Sex in space is the perfect subject for levity and double entendres, and the panelists at a Deep Tech Week session held at Thinkspace Seattle leaned into the humor early on.

“We can all imagine Newton’s Third Law dictates that, unrestrained, you get one thrust in and then you’re at the other end of the spacecraft,” said Shawna Pandya, chief of space medicine at the Florida-based Advanced SpaceLife Research Institute, or ASRI. Early pioneers in the field even designed a spacesuit customized for zero-G intimacy that was equipped with flaps and harnesses in strategic places — giving new meaning to the term “love handles.”

But the researchers at Friday’s session didn’t dwell on the mechanics of in-space intercourse. “I think the sex part will be the easiest part, operationally,” said James Logan, former chief of medical operations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “The problems are what comes after that.”

For that reason, the panelists left the levity behind and focused on the serious subject of pregnancy and fetal development in the challenging environment beyond our home planet.

Last year, researchers found evidence that exposure to space radiation during pregnancy would carry a “significantly higher” risk of producing congenital birth defects. More recently, a different set of researchers reported that zero-G conditions impaired sperm navigation, egg fertilization and embryo development in mammals.

Alex Layendecker, ASRI’s founder and director, said the health effects of exposure to the space environment might not show up until more than a generation later. One study, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, focused on female mice that were flown on the International Space Station, and then brought back to be mated with males on Earth.

“The first generation seemed not to have many differences, but when the grandchildren mice were born — and this was a really big smoking gun — the grandchildren mice actually had a significantly altered phenotype,” Layendecker said. “They had differences in mass. They had differences in behavior.”

All this could be a deal-killer for the kinds of space settlements seen in science-fiction shows like “For All Mankind” — and it casts serious doubt on SpaceX trillionaire Elon Musk’s dream of sending a million settlers to Mars.

“Based on my knowledge and experience, I don’t think one-third G (Mars-level gravity) is going to be enough, and if one-third G isn’t enough, one-sixth G (moon-level gravity) isn’t going to cut it, either,” Logan said. “So, it may be eventually that the moon and Mars will be resource depots. They will remain outposts. I don’t really believe that men, women and children of multiple generations are going to be living on the moon the way it is envisioned.”

Layendecker said that raises an “existential question” about humanity’s future beyond its home planet. And maybe about humanity’s future, period. “If you are not able to make yourselves multiplanetary, then mathematically, over the course of time, single-planet species don’t survive,” he said. “There is only so much time in Earth’s geological history before some cataclysmic event happens that eventually puts you out of the game.”

The proponents of off-Earth settlement, led by Musk, regard settlements on Mars, the moon and other celestial bodies as a Plan B guaranteeing the human species’ survival. But in order for that plan to work, humans have to be able to reproduce in those settlements. “Let’s theorize here,” Layendecker said. “We have a settlement on Mars … and Earth is completely wiped out, so no humans here. The planet is uninhabitable. If the people on Mars cannot have children and cannot reproduce over time, they’re going to die out one generation deep.”

Pandya said genetic engineering could provide a way out. She pointed to an article on the subject published by MIT Technology Review. “They make the argument that it’s not an ethical question to genetically enhance your astronauts,” she said. “It’s actually more unethical to send them into this high-radiation, dangerous environment if you’re not protecting them.”

Logan said radiation protection measures and gravity countermeasures should be considered as essential for future space settlers as air, water and food. So far, however, those issues have gotten relatively little attention.

ASRI is trying to do something about that: The institute has drawn up a 30-year roadmap for space research focusing on reproductive biology — an initiative known as Sexual Health and Reproductive Planning, or SHARP. It’s also looking to expand its presence to Europe, where the regulatory environment is friendlier to reproductive science, and perhaps also to Seattle.

“We are one organization that I hope blossoms into multiple organizations around the world,” Layendecker said. “I hope that we don’t remain the only ‘space sex institute’ that is out there, because it is going to take hundreds, probably thousands of researchers, thousands of people to really begin to tackle this problem.”

Even though the serious study of sex in space still hasn’t gotten past first base, Logan sees reason for hope. “When you talk about sex in space, nobody really giggles anymore, because people are more attuned to it,” he said. “They know the ultimate thing is to get humans off the planet, so very few people giggle anymore — and that giggle factor in my time at NASA was the largest impediment to progress.”

SpaceX’s initial public offering is likely to boost the company’s valuation to $1.77 trillion, promote CEO Elon Musk to trillionaire status — and benefit the Seattle area’s space community as well.

The $75 billion IPO, which will add SpaceX to the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday, is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history. It’ll provide more capital for expanding SpaceX’s satellite networks and putting the company’s Starship mega-rocket into operation. Shareholders, including some of the hundreds of SpaceX employees in the Seattle area, could get a golden opportunity to cash in.

There could also be a payoff for Pacific Northwest space ventures that are banking on the lower launch costs and higher payload capacity SpaceX is promising to deliver.

“The reality is that SpaceX is the elephant in the room — and for a real reason, which is that they’ve got the lowest cost of launch and will continue to do so when Starship is up and running,” said Brendan Wales, general partner at Fuse, a Seattle-based venture capital firm. “So, whether SpaceX is successful or not, it is very impactful on Seattle startups.”

Those startups include a few that have received funding from Fuse, such as Redmond-based Starcloud, which aims to send a constellation of data center satellites into space; and Bothell-based Portal Space Systems, which is developing highly maneuverable spacecraft designed to inspect, service or deorbit other satellites.

The list of Washington state’s space ventures doesn’t stop there: Space Northwest, a Seattle-based space industry association, says more than 75 space companies call the Evergreen State their home.

SpaceX connects with the Seattle area

Even SpaceX is on Space Northwest’s map, by virtue of the company’s satellite production facility in Redmond. Back in 2015, Musk told a Seattle Center audience consisting primarily of potential employees that the satellite operation would be set up in the Seattle area instead of Southern California because “a lot of you guys, it seems, don’t want to move to L.A.”

Since then, SpaceX’s Redmond campus has been responsible for building nearly two-thirds of the world’s active satellites in orbit, and according to SpaceX’s IPO filing, the factory continues to turn out 70 satellites per week for its Starlink broadband internet constellation. With more than 12 million subscribers, Starlink generates more than half of SpaceX’s revenue and is the only one of the company’s three business segments to turn a profit.

SpaceX hasn’t said how many of its employees work in Redmond, although informal estimates range from 800 to 2,000. It’s even less clear how many of those employees will cash in on stock options. For what it’s worth, comments posted to Reddit suggest there won’t be enough of an impact to skew the Seattle area’s already-overheated housing market. “I think it’s going to be a big nothingburger,” one commenter wrote.

Starlink was just the first step in Musk’s strategy to turn SpaceX into a satellite company as well as a launch company. Most recently, Musk has laid out a vision for sending a million satellites into orbit to process data for artificial intelligence. But the IPO filing suggests that Redmond won’t be getting the biggest piece of that action: Instead, SpaceX says its operation in Bastrop, Texas, will be put in charge of producing AI compute satellites.

Seattle-area ventures connect with SpaceX

The impact of this week’s IPO won’t be limited to SpaceX and its shareholders, said Stan Shull, who monitors the Seattle area’s space industry as the founder and managing director of Alliance Velocity.

“A successful SpaceX IPO is likely to further accelerate the space industry, driving even more investment into the sector,” Shull said in an email. “Also, we may see a new round of now-wealthy SpaceX employees leave and start new entrepreneurial space ventures, including here in the greater Seattle area. Finally, the significant funds that SpaceX is raising with this IPO will help to ensure their success developing the Starship rocket, which some space companies are banking on for their own business models.”

For example, Marysville-based Gravitics is developing the orbital equivalent of aircraft carriers for customers including the U.S. Space Force. The largest varieties of those cargo-carrying spacecraft are designed to ride into space on SpaceX’s Starship or other heavy-lift rockets.

“SpaceX gets you to space. Gravitics makes it possible to operate once you’re there,” Gravitics CEO Colin Doughan said in an email. “The IPO confirms the launch layer is durable enough to build on. We’re executing on the logistics layer above it: more mass per mission, lower cost per kilogram, designed for the way commercial operators are actually flying now.  We are thrilled for our friends at SpaceX and see this as good for the industry overall.”

Jason Andrews, the co-founder and CEO of a spaceflight training venture called Orbite Space, acknowledged that he and fellow founder Nicolas Gaume had SpaceX’s Starship in mind when they created their Seattle-based company.

“Nicolas and I did indeed start Orbite because of the revolution Starship represents — a radical reduction in price, increase in frequency, and overall improvement in the client experience,” he said in an email. “As outlined by SpaceX, one of their ultimate missions is human expansion to the moon and eventually Mars, which is a good thing for the prospect of human spaceflight across the range of customers: governments, businesses and consumers. … Human spaceflight will soon be available to a much wider swath of humanity, and we are excited to play a small part in making that happen!”

Starcloud has already struck a deal to use SpaceX’s laser-based communication system on its own data center satellites, and plans to have Starship send its Starcloud-3 satellites into orbit when SpaceX is ready to take on commercial customers.

That may take a while, Shull said. “Initially, SpaceX is likely to prioritize Starship launches for its own space business ambitions and commitments. These include next-generation Starlink deployments, contracted flights for NASA’s Artemis moon program, its ambitious orbital AI data center plans, and possibly even test flights to Mars,” he said. “While I think Starship can and will be a total game-changer for the space industry, companies whose business models are largely or entirely reliant on ultra-low-cost Starship availability might have to bide their time or compete for early flight opportunities.”

SpaceX currently dominates the global launch industry — and if it continues to do so in the post-IPO era, Shull said the company may not feel the need to reduce its prices as rapidly as potential customers hope. Heightened competition from Seattle-area launch companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture (for heavy-lift payloads) and Stoke Space (for medium-lift payloads) could change the equation.

The excitement generated by SpaceX’s IPO, and by lower launch costs, could also spark a new wave of companies doing things that sound like science fiction today. For example, one of the startups in a recent Y Combinator cohort, Galactic Resource Utilization Space, aims to build the first hotel on the moon.

Wales, the startup investor at Fuse, acknowledges that some of the business plans inspired by SpaceX’s IPO may never get off the ground. But the way he sees it, that’s totally normal.

“That type of thing happens when you’ve got a lot of capital flowing into a market, and then maybe it pulls back and there’s less of the wild stuff,” he said. “But I like these bubbly moments, because it allows for creativity. Some things will survive, and there are going to be things that could change the world.”

Four founders of companies on the tech frontier got together this week at a Seattle conference for a show-and-tell about the hardware at the heart of their businesses. And like any good show-and-tell, their talks touched on strategy as well as gadgetry.

For example, consider the laser-powered weed zapper pioneered by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics. The LaserWeeder system takes advantage of optical sensors and artificial intelligence to identify and target the weeds among the crops as the robotic rig is pulled through a field.

Carbon Robotics’ founder and CEO, Paul Mikesell, held up one of the LaserWeeder’s scanners during Monday’s DeepTech session at the downtown office of K&L Gates.

“We have it set up so this camera can see exactly what the laser shooting this way is going to hit, and every time we turn on that laser, the same pixel area in the camera is going to explode and blow up,” he said. “This device reminds me of a lot of science and technology that we had to tackle, but also, there’s a lot of pain that went into this thing.”

The company’s engineers had to figure out how to target weeds precisely based on imagery that was distorted by the camera’s viewing angle. “It’s a pretty incredible feat to get that right, and once we got it right, we’re just banging off them all the time,” Mikesell said.

Mikesell said he’s often asked about his strategy for selling LaserWeeders through farm-implement dealerships. “We decided to go direct every time, all the time,” he said. “And so we have a global team of sales reps and service support people. What that means is, we maintain the customer relationship. We know what things are being used for, how well it’s working, what are their challenges. And the customers know how to get a hold of us directly instead of going through a dealership.”

He’s looking forward to the day when artificial intelligence can speed up the process of hardware design. “I’m surprised by the lack of an AI tool in there, but I think it’s also because, you know, software engineers wrote the software that made the AI, so they’re much more comfortable with it,” Mikesell said.

“We actually did hook Claude up to an oscilloscope and got it to produce firmware that was proving out what we needed,” he said. “So I think that’s just going to continue to come.”

Starfish Space co-founder Austin Link’s gadget for the show-and-tell was too big to lift off the display table. It was an engineering model of Starfish’s Otter Pup spacecraft, one of which is currently in the midst of an orbital satellite docking test.

“We actually ran a pretty exciting test over the weekend, which I can’t tell you about yet,” Link said.

Otter Pup is designed to prove out technologies that will be used on Starfish’s full-scale Otter spacecraft for inspecting or maneuvering other satellites in orbit. “Humans have done this before, but every time we’ve done it before, it’s really expensive,” Link said. “You look at a Northrop Grumman satellite that did a similar mission. They made $65 million by extending the life of a satellite. It cost $400 million to do it.”

Starfish aims to use innovations in computer vision and robotics to make satellite docking more affordable. That means the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup has to do more with less.

“This satellite has just a single thruster on board, and the force that that thruster creates is the equivalent of a house fly sitting on your hand,” Link said. “It’s a tiny amount of force, so you have to apply it very thoughtfully over time. You have to predict what’s going to unfold with the physics and ultimately come together and dock. And that’s our big challenge as a company, not just with a demonstration satellite, but eventually with our full-size Otter.”

Overland AI builds autonomous off-road vehicles, including a 3,000-pound tactical vehicle that can transport supplies, drones or even anti-drone weapon systems for warfighting units.

“It’s not super-easy to get one in this room, but I wish I could have brought it,” said Byron Boots, co-founder and CEO of the Seattle-based startup. “Instead, what I did was rip the sensor pod off one of these vehicles.”

The sensor pod is equipped with stereo cameras and a lidar ranging system, all of which are hooked into an onboard computer. “This is from something called our SPARK Kit, which allows you to take any vehicle and make it autonomous,” Boots said. “It actually hangs up over the head of where someone would sit on a vehicle like this.”

Even though “AI” is part of the company’s name, Overland AI’s focus has widened from just writing the software to building the hardware as well.

“In order to move fast, we decided we just needed to do that ourselves and own that full vertically integrated stack,” said Boots, who is a professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Washington as well as a startup CEO. “If you do that, you can then literally hand this robotic system with an autonomous stack on it to a user, and they can just start using it. You don’t have to wait for someone else to integrate with you.”

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud made its mark at the intersection of AI and space operations last year when it became the first company to train a large language model in Earth orbit. For this week’s show-and-tell, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Ezra Feilden, brought an Nvidia H100 GPU — the same type of AI chip that was used for last year’s in-space demonstration.

“It’s very high power density. These GPUs were designed to sit and have a nice easy life inside a data center. They were not designed to be strapped to a rocket and launched into the vacuum of space, and then be run for five years without any maintenance or any TLC,” Feilden said. “So, that’s part of what we do at Starcloud. We ruggedize GPUs and other IT hardware such that they survive the launch, and then they can operate continuously in space without any mechanical intervention.”

Orbital data centers are attracting a rising tide of buzz because they could get around some of the big problems created by the rapidly growing hunger for AI data processing capacity: for example, limits on available electrical power, and concerns about land and water use.

Data processing in space brings its own challenges, however. How many solar-powered satellites will be required to handle the load? How will they be connected? And how will they be able to get rid of the waste heat produced by all those high-powered AI chips? Feilden and his colleagues at Starcloud are working to address those challenges.

Feilden said his company is scaling up operations at a new facility in Woodinville. “We’ll be deploying dozens of satellites that we build from that facility in the next couple of years, scaling up to thousands of satellites per year, which is the number that we need to hit to have a meaningful impact on the terrestrial data center industry with what we’re doing,” he said.

Starcloud isn’t the only company with big ambitions for orbital data centers. SpaceX, which is just days away from the world’s biggest initial public offering, envisions putting a million data center satellites in orbit. But SpaceX could be as much of a partner as a competitor. Last month, Starcloud struck a deal to use SpaceX’s Starlink mini laser terminals on its own satellites. And Starcloud is counting on new launch vehicles, including SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket, to drive down the cost of putting satellites in orbit.

“We strongly believe that’s happening very soon,” Feilden said. “This decade, certainly.”

Starfish Space’s Austin Link was intrigued by that perspective. He noted that Feilden and his colleagues are working with a business model that assumes launch costs will decline significantly. “We assume that launch cost is what it is today, and we don’t make any changes in our models when we’re designing products,” Link said. “It’s a really interesting contrast.”

The schedule of events for Deep Tech Week Seattle continues through Friday.

The Federal Communications Commission has freed Amazon from a requirement to deploy the first 1,616 satellites in its Amazon Leo broadband internet constellation by July 30.

The looming deadline had been a condition of the FCC’s 2020 license for the network, when it was known as Project Kuiper. But in January, Amazon asked for a two-year extension of that deadline, citing the limited availability of commercial launch opportunities.

Instead of pushing back July’s interim deadline, the FCC issued a conditional waiver. Amazon is still required to deploy all 3,232 of its planned Gen 1 satellites by July 30, 2029, as originally mandated. Amazon Leo currently has 331 satellites in orbit, with another 36 due for launch next week.

SpaceX — which operates Starlink, a rival satellite broadband network with more than 10 million subscribers — opposed giving Amazon more time. It argued that the FCC should make Amazon wait for a future processing round. But in an order issued on Friday, the FCC said its remedy was “tailored to ensure that Americans quickly benefit from multiple, facilities-based providers of next-gen satellite services.”

Under the conditional waiver, Amazon Leo satellites launched after July 30 would temporarily lose priority status. That means Amazon bears the regulatory burden of ensuring its newer satellites won’t interfere with other constellations, including Starlink.

Amazon can reclaim its priority status in March 2028, or sooner if it hits the 50% deployment milestone before then. The order also includes a provision to restore priority status in October 2027 if Amazon can prove it has manufactured all necessary hardware and fully secured the required launch manifests to hit the 50% mark.

Amazon still faces a challenging schedule to meet its final milestone. It has reserved dozens of launches on rockets ranging from United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 and Vulcan to Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company has also been counting on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to launch Amazon Leo satellites on its New Glenn rocket. But two weeks ago, a New Glenn rocket blew up on its Florida launch pad during a static-fire test — forcing what’s likely to be months of delay in Blue Origin’s launch schedule.

Despite the snags, Amazon says it plans to start rolling out commercial service this year.

Space Northwest, a nonprofit association serving the Pacific Northwest’s space industry ecosystem, says it’s partnering with the Commercial Space Federation to launch a regional space business accelerator.

The initiative will begin with an executive roundtable scheduled this summer, followed by a 12-week accelerator program due to begin in autumn. The accelerator is expected to support up to 10 early-stage space companies with programming focused on commercial space markets, investment readiness, tech commercialization, growth strategies for commercial and government markets, and integration into the space industry’s global supply chain.

The accelerator initiative will receive local support from the City of Kent, which hosts Blue Origin, Stoke Space, PowerLight Technologies and other ventures targeting space applications. The city has a heritage in the space industry that goes back to Boeing’s role in building lunar rovers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions.

A report published in 2022 estimated the overall economic impact of Washington state’s core space industry at $4.6 billion annually, supporting more than 13,000 jobs. That impact is probably greater today than it was four years ago. Blue Origin was said to employ about 6,000 people nationwide in 2022, but more recent figures suggest the company has upwards of 12,000 employees.

“The Pacific Northwest has a uniquely entrepreneurial space ecosystem complemented by world-class aviation, software and advanced technology industries,” Sean McClinton, Space Northwest’s co-founder, said today in a news release. “We believe this accelerator can help capitalize on the region’s strengths and support innovators building the next generation of world-class space companies.”

The Washington, D.C.-based Commercial Space Federation will shape the accelerator curriculum. “Commercial space scales on the industrial base around it, not just its marquee names,” said Kelli Kedis Ogborn, strategic adviser on global Markets and industry engagement at CSF. “The Pacific Northwest has both: world-class aerospace leaders and the deep bench of adjacent capability the sector needs to grow.”

Ogborn said the accelerator program will aim to “connect those strengths to the broader national commercial space community and turn the region’s industrial depth into a driving force in the space supply chain.”

Space Northwest said additional details about the application process, program structure, speakers and partner organizations will be announced later this year.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture aims to repair the damage done last week by a launch-pad rocket explosion and return to flight before the end of the year, the company’s CEO says.

In a post to X, CEO Dave Limp laid out a schedule that was more optimistic than what was expected immediately after last Thursday’s fiery destruction of a New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test. CNBC quoted NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as saying that it would “take some serious time” to restore Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

In his post, Limp said he had “a bit of good news” to share after inspecting the pad and the complex’s integration facility.

“The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape,” he said. “This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ and the three GS-2s [upper stages] that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.”

Limp said the pad would be rebuilt to accommodate the current 7×2 New Glenn configuration, which offers a seven-engine first stage and a two-engine upper stage, rather than immediately transitioning to the next-generation configuration with nine engines on the first stage and four on the upper stage.

“Rate manufacturing of 7×2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use,” he said. “In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop [concept of operations], and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.

“We will fly again before the end of the year,” Limp wrote. Then he signed off with Blue Origin’s motto, “Gradatim Ferociter,” which is Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously.”

If New Glenn returns to flight this year, that would be relatively good news for NASA and Blue Origin’s other customers. NASA had tapped New Glenn and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to deliver a set of payloads to the moon this fall, and to send the space agency’s VIPER rover to the moon’s south polar region in 2027.

A crew-capable version of the Blue Moon lander was slated to have its first flight test in low Earth orbit as early as next year during NASA’s Artemis 3 mission. And just this month, NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $468 million to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles, or LTVs, to the moon in the 2028 time frame. All those opportunities depend on having New Glenn and its launch pad back in operation.

New Glenn also figures prominently in the plans of another company founded by Bezos: Amazon. Blue Origin, a private venture that’s separate from publicly traded Amazon, was due to launch 48 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband internet constellation as early as this week. The rocket that exploded — nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary” — was being tested in preparation for taking on that task.

Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Amazon Leo, told his team in an internal memo obtained by Business Insider that it was still too early to speculate on the cause of the explosion or its potential effects.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time and it’s worth saying: Spaceflight is hard, and setbacks happen,” he wrote in the memo.

Amazon has reserved scores of launches with other providers, including United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and SpaceX — and the satellites that were earmarked to ride on New Glenn can be shifted to those other companies’ rockets. United Launch Alliance delivered 29 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit with an Atlas 5 launch last Friday, boosting the constellation’s count to 331.

“New Glenn is just one vehicle in our lineup,” Badyal wrote. “Our mission hasn’t changed, our commitment to our customers and delivering service hasn’t changed.”

Correction for 8 a.m. PT June 3: We’ve corrected this report to explain that Blue Origin’s 7×2 and 9×4 rocket configurations refer to the number of engines rather than the size of their fairings.

For an interactive look at Blue Origin’s Launch Complex 36 before and after the New Glenn explosion, check out this presentation of Planet Labs imagery on SpaceFromSpace.com, and be sure to use the “Transparency” slider to compare the before-and-after views.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is still assessing the damage from this week’s catastrophic New Glenn rocket explosion on the company’s Florida launch pad, but it’s already clear that it will take months to make repairs and return to flight. So, what does that mean for Blue Origin and its customers?

“I guess the short answer, without pontificating, is that everybody gets delayed,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a Florida-based industry research institute.

Thursday night’s blast occurred during a static-fire test for the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which was nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary.” The launcher was due to put 48 satellites into low Earth orbit as early as next week for Amazon Leo’s high-speed internet network.

That launch is now off the table, but Amazon Leo (formerly known as Project Kuiper) is still pushing ahead with satellite deployment in anticipation of kicking off commercial service as soon as this summer. Not far from Blue Origin’s ruined pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36, United Launch Alliance sent 29 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit today on an Atlas 5 rocket.

Amazon has also reserved dozens of future launches on Arianespace’s Ariane 6, ULA’s next-generation Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. “Weirdly, as far as New Glenn customers go, Amazon is probably in the best position to deal with this setback,” Henry said. “They’ve got safety through the diversity of their launch supplier base, where if one company goes down, they can depend on another to keep the constellation going.”

Nevertheless, there is a limit. “If they were depending on Blue Origin to get them over the hump to the minimum number of satellites they have deemed necessary for turning on service, that goal is going to take a little bit longer,” Henry said.

How long will it take to get the New Glenn rocket back on track? “If we were looking at something that was purely just a rocket failure, then I would say three to six months is the expected range for a return to flight,” Henry said.

But it’s not just a rocket failure. Extensive damage was done to the launch pad and its surroundings. “We haven’t had that many launch pads that have been destroyed, which is a great thing,” Henry said. “I would look at how long it took SpaceX to get back to flight after the AMOS-6 failure back in 2016. That’s probably the best proxy for this kind of thing.”

It took SpaceX 15 months to repair its pad at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 40 and resume launches. In the interim, SpaceX continued to send up rockets from alternate launch pads, but that option isn’t immediately available to Blue Origin. Launch Complex 36 was the only Blue Origin facility capable of accommodating New Glenn. Additional pads are being planned in Florida and California, but those plans are still just in their beginning stages.

Not good news for NASA

If it takes more than a couple of months to get New Glenn back in service, that will add complications to NASA’s plans for sending astronauts to the moon and eventually building a permanent lunar base. New Glenn was due to launch Blue Origin’s robotic Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the moon this fall with NASA payloads on board, partly to test technologies for a crew-capable Mark 2 lander.

There was a chance that the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander might be tested in low Earth orbit next year during NASA’s Artemis 3 mission. But with New Glenn sidelined, the timeline for developing the Blue Moon architecture faces steep hurdles. That will force NASA to rely more heavily on SpaceX’s Starship, which is navigating its own developmental challenges.

NASA is planning to use either Starship or Blue Moon to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028 during the Artemis 4 mission. And just this week, NASA announced that it had chosen Blue Origin, New Glenn and Blue Moon to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles to the moon in time for those vehicles to be used by the Artemis program’s astronauts.

John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told Time magazine that the New Glenn explosion raises fresh questions about those plans. “This incident certainly throws a monkey wrench in the Artemis schedule, which was probably not achievable even before the explosion,” Time quoted Logsdon as saying.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman acknowledged the challenge today in a memo sent to agency employees. “I am sure it is not lost on anyone how this situation could potentially impact our Artemis and Moon Base ambitions,” he wrote. “I also know that most of you chose careers at NASA because you thrive in challenging circumstances. This moment is challenging, but it is far from insurmountable.”

A reminder that ‘rockets are hard’

NASA isn’t the only government customer for New Glenn launches. The Pentagon is also planning to use the rocket for national security launches. Despite this week’s explosion, the U.S. Space Force announced today that Blue Origin was receiving a task order from the National Reconnaissance Office for a New Glenn launch in the 2027-2028 time frame.

“This anomaly is a solemn reminder that the critical capability this community provides is rocket science and inherently challenging,” Space Force Lt. Col. Doug Downs said in a news release. “The National Security Space Launch program will continue working closely with our Blue Origin partners to help identify the root cause and implement corrective actions.”

According to Henry, one of the biggest losers — at least in the short term — is AST SpaceMobile, which planned to lean on the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket to launch its BlueBird satellites for direct-to-device connectivity. The first such launch took place last month, but AST’s satellite was sent into the wrong orbit.

The fact that New Glenn is now out of commission just adds to AST’s woes.

“If you look at their satellite design, they have very big satellites, which means they can’t fit that many on other rockets, even the Falcon 9,” Henry said. “AST is the poster child for the perfect New Glenn customer. … Now they’re going to have to wait longer, or depend more heavily on other launch providers.”

Finding those alternatives “might be easier said than done, because we’re in the fourth year of a global shortage of commercial launch supply,” Henry said.

AST’s share price dropped about 15% today, and other publicly traded space companies saw their value decline as well — perhaps at least in part because the New Glenn explosion reminded investors that, as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk put it, “rockets are hard.”

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded today during a hotfire test on its launch pad in Florida — dealing heavy damage to the pad, and dealing a heavy blow to Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

“All personnel are accounted for and safe,” Bezos said in a post to X. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

The U.S. Space Force confirmed that there were no injuries or fatalities. “Range officials, in coordination with Blue Origin and appropriate partners, are currently evaluating available data to determine the exact cause of the anomaly,” it said in a Facebook post. In a follow-up post to X, the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 cautioned that debris from the anomaly could wash ashore over the coming days or weeks.

The 322-foot-tall rocket, nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary” in a reference to the movie “Interstellar,” had been due to send 48 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit as soon as next week. The Federal Aviation Administration gave its go-ahead for launch last week after Blue Origin wrapped up an investigation of a launch failure that occurred in April.

In preparation for liftoff, the New Glenn rocket was brought out to Blue Origin’s pad at Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for a static test firing of its booster engines. The satellites were not aboard the rocket for the test.

Video showed the rocket exploding in a huge fireball after the engines were lit up. “They just nuked the pad,” one observer could be heard saying in a video recorded by Spaceflight Now. Other views of the blast were captured by NASASpaceflight.com.

Space Launch Complex 36 is the only facility built to launch the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, and the pad will need to be repaired before Blue Origin can return to flight. There’s certain to be an investigation of the incident conducted under the supervision of the Space Force and other authorities.

Next week’s scheduled launch would have marked the first use of New Glenn to put satellites into orbit for the Amazon Leo broadband network. More than 300 Amazon Leo satellites are already in low Earth orbit, thanks to launches by SpaceX, Arianespace and United Launch Alliance — and today’s anomaly doesn’t affect the schedules for those companies. United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket is due to launch 29 Amazon Leo satellites from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41 on Friday.

Blue Origin’s launch schedule, in contrast, appears likely to be put on hold for months. The company was expected to send its robotic Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the moon as early as this fall with NASA payloads on board. And NASA has scheduled a potential test of a crew-capable Blue Moon Mark 2 lander in low Earth orbit next year for its Artemis 3 mission.

Earlier this week, NASA announced that it had selected Blue Origin and New Glenn to deliver two commercial lunar terrain vehicles to the moon by 2028 as part of its decade-long initiative to build a permanent moon base. Now all those plans are up in the air.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post to X that the space agency was made aware of today’s anomaly. “Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” he said. “We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets. 
We will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available.”

Blue Origin came in for some sympathy from Bezos’ billionaire rival, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who had to deal with a launch-pad explosion in 2016 and a test-stand explosion in 2025. “Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly,” Musk wrote on X.

Thanks to Spaceflight Now and NASASpaceflight.com for permission to use imagery of the explosion.

Five weeks after experiencing its first launch failure, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is getting ready to put its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket back in service to launch 48 satellites into low Earth orbit for the growing Amazon Leo constellation.

The mission, designated as NG-4 for the rocket and LN-01 for the payload, will mark the first time Blue Origin’s rockets have launched satellites for Amazon — forging a new connection between the two best-known companies founded by Jeff Bezos. It will also set a new high for the number of Leo broadband satellites launched on a single mission.

“Couldn’t be prouder to support the Leo team on this mission,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a post to X. Before he joined Blue Origin in 2023, Limp was the Amazon executive in charge of the Amazon Leo program (when it was known as Project Kuiper).

This will be the fourth launch of a New Glenn rocket. The first-stage booster for NG-4 is nicknamed “No, It’s Necessary” — a line from the movie “Interstellar” that refers to the need for a bold space maneuver.

New Glenn had been grounded in the wake of last month’s unsuccessful launch of an AST SpaceMobile satellite from Florida. But last week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it accepted the findings of an investigation led by Blue Origin. The investigation said the mishap was caused by a cryogenic leak that froze a hydraulic line, leading to a thrust anomaly during the second-stage engine burn.

Blue Origin identified nine corrective actions to prevent a recurrence of the mishap, and the FAA authorized the company to return to flight. An FAA advisory suggested the launch could take place as early as next week.

Amazon Leo currently has just over 300 satellites in orbit, and thousands more satellites are due to be launched in the next three years. Under the terms of its original license from the Federal Communications Commission, more than 1,600 satellites were supposed to be launched by June 30, but Amazon is seeking a two-year extension of that deadline.

So far, most of the satellites have been launched by United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rockets, but the pace of deployment is expected to double over the coming year as heavy-lift rockets including New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan and Arianespace’s Ariane 6 swing into action. Amazon says it has 24 New Glenn rocket launches reserved for satellite deployment missions.

Amazon Leo aims to start phasing in commercial satellite broadband internet service as soon as this summer, starting in mid-northern and mid-southern latitudes. Coverage is expected to expand as more satellites are launched. Leo hasn’t yet announced pricing for its service.

SpaceX’s Starlink network currently dominates the satellite broadband market, with more than 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit and more than 12 million subscribers. SpaceX also serves as a launch provider for Amazon Leo, illustrating how even rivals can become partners in the space industry.

In other developments:

• Amazon laid out further details in its plan to acquire Globalstar and its direct-to-device satellite constellation this week in a filing with the FCC. The plan, which requires FCC approval, calls for Apple to transfer its 20% stake in Globalstar to Amazon (via a newly created subsidiary called “Grapefruit”). Globalstar’s infrastructure and its licenses for satellite service would be transferred to Amazon, and Amazon would file its own license application to operate a global D2D satellite system purpose-built for mobile connectivity. The system would be complementary to the broadband service offered by Amazon Leo. When the $10.8 billion acquisition deal was announced last month, Amazon said the agreement was expected to close in 2027.
• The FAA said it will oversee an investigation of last week’s flight test of SpaceX’s Starship V3 rocket. During the test, the engines on the rocket’s Super Heavy first-stage booster failed to fire properly after stage separation for what was meant to be a controlled descent and splashdown. As a result, the booster tumbled through its atmospheric re-entry and broke apart, with debris falling into the Gulf of Mexico. Starship’s return to flight will be based on the FAA determining that any system, process or procedure related to the mishap will not affect public safety.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won NASA’s nod to deliver crew-carrying rovers to the lunar surface as part of the space agency’s decade-long plan to create a base near the moon’s south pole.

“America is returning to the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said today during a news briefing at the space agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We are working alongside our many international and commercial partners to leverage the incredible capabilities from commercial industry to build a moon base for all we hope to accomplish in this endeavor.”

NASA awarded Blue Origin an initial $188 million contract to get its robotic Blue Moon Mark 1 lander ready to deliver lunar terrain vehicles, or LTVs, with an option period worth an additional $280.4 million for two task orders. The option period will be based on Blue Origin’s performance during the initial contract phase, NASA said.

Carlos Garcia-Galan, program manager for NASA’s Moon Base program, said the LTVs will be “a mix between the Apollo lunar roving vehicle and the Mars-style rover.” Each rover will weigh a little less than one metric ton, he said, and will be folded up to fit on Blue Origin’s lander during transit to the moon.

The first LTV is due to be brought to the moon in advance of the Artemis 4 mission’s crewed landing, which is currently scheduled for 2028, Garcia-Galan said.

One of the LTVs will be built by California-based Astrolab, with Seattle-based Interlune serving as a subcontractor. In a LinkedIn post, Interlune said it would work with Astrolab on “many aspects of the rover development, involving the science of survival in the lunar environment.” The Interlune Research Lab in Texas will develop varieties of simulated moon dirt specifically for testing Astrolab’s moon rover, which has been designated CLV-1.

The other LTV will be Colorado-based Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus rover, which is being developed in partnership with General Motors, Goodyear and Leidos.

Both LTVs are designed to travel at speeds of up to 10 kilometers per hour (6 mph), carrying up to two astronauts on 10-kilometer (6-mile) trips. The rovers could also take on robotic excursions with a maximum range of 200 kilometers (125 miles). Astrolab is receiving a $219 million contract, while Lunar Outpost’s contract is worth $220 million, NASA said.

In a statement posted to X, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin said it was proud to support NASA’s plans for a permanent presence in the moon’s south polar region. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, also gave a shout-out to Isaacman on his social-media account.

“Since the beginning, Blue Origin has been committed to Lunar Permanence,” Limp wrote. “Thank you, @NASAadmin, for sharing that vision. We’re ready to make it a reality.”

NASA will also develop a fleet of rocket-powered MoonFall drones for reconnaissance and communications. The drones will be built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Garcia-Galan said they’d be dropped off at the moon by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace’s Elytra Dark spacecraft. Firefly said its contract for a four-drone delivery is worth $75 million.

NASA’s Moon Base program could get its official kickoff as early as this fall with the launch of Endurance, Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. Endurance, which is currently going through preflight testing, is scheduled to deliver several payloads to the moon’s south polar region — including a retroreflector system for gauging distances and a camera system for studying how thrusters interact with the moon’s surface. This first Blue Moon mission has been on the schedule for more than a year, but Garcia-Galan said it is now known as Moon Base 1.

The Moon Base 2 mission calls for a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to deliver Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Griffin lander to the moon later this year. Griffin will be carrying more than 1,100 pounds of cargo. One of the payloads is an Astrolab rover that’s outfitted with an Interlune imaging system capable of surveying the lunar surface for traces of valuable helium-3.

For the Moon Base 3 mission, Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander will fly the first payload selected through a NASA initiative known as Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon, or PRISM. Lunar Vertex will study lunar swirls — bright spots on the moon’s surface that are thought to be caused by magnetic anomalies. The lander will also carry payloads for the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.

“These represent the first of more than a dozen missions we expect to announce through the balance of this year, as we return, build the base, and never give up the moon again,” Isaacman said.

Moon Base 1 and the LTV deliveries aren’t the only lunar missions in which Blue Origin is playing a key role. For example, the company’s second Mark 1 lander has been tasked with delivering NASA’s robotic VIPER rover to the lunar surface in late 2027.

Blue Origin is also working on a Blue Moon Mark 2 lunar lander that could carry future Artemis crews to the lunar surface. NASA is aiming to test the Mark 2 and/or SpaceX’s Starship-based lunar lander next year in low Earth orbit during the Artemis 3 mission.

“We’re already moving forward pretty strongly with both Blue Origin and SpaceX on their lander concepts,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate. “There’s a lot of trade studies ongoing right now, just to make sure we’ve got the mission designs right and the right objectives for those.”

Isaacman said NASA’s strategy called for “leveraging the NASA playbook from the 1960s, figuring out what works and what doesn’t in this epic science of survival.”

The announcements that were made today focused on the first phase of NASA’s Moon Base plan, which aims to establish reliable access to the lunar surface and characterize resources at the south polar region, where significant reserves of water ice are thought to exist.

The second phase of the project, scheduled for the 2029-2032 time frame, calls for setting up infrastructure for lunar operations, including energy facilities that rely on solar or nuclear power. During the third phase, NASA and its partners would establish a permanent base.

“We envision the moon base to be hundreds of square miles, with different assets all building up to the objective of permanent lunar presence,” Garcia-Galan said.

Isaacman said there are “a lot of great things that will come from having an outpost on the moon,” with the ability to prepare for farther-out missions leading his list.

“There will be scientific discoveries,” he said. “Let’s land rovers with radio telescopes to go to the far side moon. Let’s ignite an orbital economy. These are all things that would be nice to have and achieve along the way, but really it is to have an environment where we can work with the water ice and master the skills for where we go next, which is Mars. … We want to be in an environment where we can learn the skills, so that astronauts can go and plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars someday.”

Redmond, Wash., has been known for decades as the home of Microsoft, to the extent that the city’s name has become synonymous with the software giant. Maybe it’s time to rethink that, because it’s also home to one of the world’s most prolific satellite factories.

SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing Wednesday that its Starlink satellite manufacturing facility in Redmond produced an average of approximately 70 satellites per week from December 2025 to April 2026, or about 3,640 per year at full rate.

By comparison, Amazon VP Rajeev Badyal said this week at a Tech Alliance event that the company’s rival satellite venture can now produce “tens of satellites a week” at its factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash., up from one satellite a month just over a year ago. Amazon Leo currently has a little more than 300 satellites in orbit, versus SpaceX’s approximately 9,600.

SpaceX is Exhibit A in a larger economic development plan, as regional leaders look to the satellite industry as a new engine for growth. More than 10,000 satellites have been built in the state, about two-thirds of all operational satellites, with more than $1.6 billion in investment in Washington space startups over the past 18 months, according to data presented at the event.

To that end, the filing by the Elon Musk venture revealed the financials behind the Starlink business, which provides high-speed satellite internet to 10.3 million subscribers. 

• SpaceX’s Connectivity segment, driven by Starlink, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating income in 2025. 
• That amounted to about 61% of SpaceX’s overall revenue of $18.7 billion in 2025, and was the only one of the company’s three segments to turn an operating profit.

The backstory: Musk announced SpaceX’s satellite internet plans at a private event in Seattle in January 2015, describing it at the time as a key element of his plan to colonize Mars.

SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has applied to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker “SPCX.” As a preliminary filing, the S-1 leaves blank the share price and number of shares to be offered. 

However, the company is looking to raise as much as $80 billion or more, according to the Wall Street Journal, which would make it the largest initial public offering in history, roughly three times larger than Saudi Aramco’s record-setting IPO in 2019. Bloomberg has reported the company could seek a valuation of more than $2 trillion. 

The filing also does not disclose how many of SpaceX’s 22,000 worldwide employees work at the Redmond facility, or provide a breakdown of employment by location.

Regional rivals: Competitive disclosures in the S-1 filing do underscore the extent to which the Pacific Northwest has become a hub for space, satellite and artificial intelligence industries. 

• In space launch services, SpaceX names Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, as an emerging commercial competitor, in addition to established players such as United Launch Alliance and Arianespace. 
• In satellite broadband connectivity, SpaceX lists Amazon’s planned Leo constellation and Blue Origin’s TeraWave among its rivals to Starlink. Others include Eutelsat OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed, and AST SpaceMobile.
• In AI, SpaceX names Redmond-based Microsoft among its competitors, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The company acquired Musk’s xAI venture, which includes the Grok AI model and the X social media platform, in early 2026. 

Amazon somehow avoided a SpaceX competitive twin-billing — it’s not listed as a competitor to xAI despite its large footprint across the field in chips, platforms, models and services. 

You can read the full S-1 filing on the SEC’s website, but make sure your Starlink connection is strong and Grok is ready to provide a summary, because it weighs in at more than 300 pages.

Eleven months after launch, Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 satellite is finally kicking its test mission into high gear, closing in for a rendezvous with a newly designated target.

If all goes according to plan, Otter Pup 2 will dock with Australia-based Gilmour Space’s ElaraSat satellite sometime in the next few months. ElaraSat became the new target after earlier plans to connect with a D-Orbit ION satellite were scrubbed for undisclosed reasons.

Trevor Bennett, one of the founders of Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space, said ElaraSat was launched on the same SpaceX satellite rideshare mission that sent Otter Pup 2 into orbit last June. Gilmour Space was “more than willing and excited to jump on and do something a little bit ambitious and crazy with us,” he told GeekWire.

Mark Grimminck, Gilmour Space’s head of satellites, said in an emailed statement that his company was “excited to support Starfish Space on this pioneering mission.”

“Autonomous rendezvous and docking are capabilities that will transform the future of sustainable space operations,” Grimminck said. “Congratulations to the Starfish team on this important milestone.”

The goal for Otter Pup 2 is to test the technologies and procedures for Starfish’s full-scale Otter spacecraft, which is meant to rendezvous with other satellites for inspection, servicing or safe disposal. The first Otter Pup prototype ran into logistical difficulties shortly after its launch in 2023 and wasn’t able to execute a satellite docking, but it did manage to demonstrate some of the technologies that Starfish developed for proximity operations.

An orbital test that was conducted last year in partnership with Impulse Space proved that Starfish’s software suite for guidance, navigation and control could be used on a different company’s satellite to make an autonomous approach to another spacecraft in orbit. Now, Otter Pup 2 is ready to take on the crucial satellite docking.

Bennett said the satellite is still in good health even though it was launched nearly a year ago. “Our goal is to continue to take the actions as we have to keep the vehicle healthy — for a whole year at least — and continue to do so for the next few months as we go through some of these critical, critical next steps all the way up to docking,” he said.

The ability to switch targets from D-Orbit’s satellite to ElaraSat is “a testament to how we’ve designed Otter Pup and some of our core technologies,” Bennett said.

“We can just go switch clients and orbits, and go chase them down, and have both the onboard capacity and the vehicle health and the opportunity through our core technologies that allow us to just go dock with an unprepared spacecraft,” he said.

Over the past couple of months, the Starfish team has been maneuvering Otter Pup 2 into the proper orbit to catch up with ElaraSat. The next phase will be to close the gap between the two satellites to about 6 miles (10 kilometers). Then Otter Pup 2 will transition into an acquisition phase. “Acquisition is the stage for us where Otter Pup’s onboard cameras start taking pictures of a large satellite regularly — lock onto it, if you will — and start maneuvering much, much closer,” Bennett said. “This is what will bring us down to the kilometer-type range.”

Otter Pup 2 will fly itself around ElaraSat for a thorough inspection and calibration of Otter Pup’s sensors and control system. Then the satellite will close in to attach itself to ElaraSat using an electrostatic docking mechanism.

“Our intention is to livestream this, the docking phase of the mission, and actually show the process as we move into docking,” Bennett said. The real-time view will probably be a computer-generated animation based on telemetry received from Otter Pup 2. In that scenario, actual imagery from the encounter would be downlinked later, Bennett said.

“We’ll share information as we’re able to through that whole process,” he said. “The spacecraft is really going to prioritize being safe and docking, so we’ll make sure that what we can share, we will share. … It’ll be an exciting time to show real telemetry, real data, both visual and positional.”

Then what? “Making good contact at one point for even a short period of time is what we’re targeting as the larger goal here,” Bennett said. “After that, if we still have a healthy vehicle and we are sobered up from celebrating, then I think it’s a great opportunity to think about what more we could do with that spacecraft.”

Starfish has been funding the Otter Pup missions internally to gather the data needed to develop the full-scale Otter. Bennett declined to discuss the current status of the Otter development effort but said he “will definitely have more to share” in the days to come.

The company already has won several contracts for Otter’s on-orbit services, including:

• A $37.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force for a satellite docking demonstration, plus a $54.5 million contract for a follow-up mission.
• A $52.5 million Space Development Agency contract for disposal of military satellites.
• A $15 million NASA contract to inspect defunct satellites.
• A commercial contract with SES to provide satellite life extension services.

Starfish was founded in 2019 by Bennett and Austin Link, both of whom are alumni of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. The startup has raised more than $150 million in total investment, including a $111.7 million Series B funding round that was reported last month.

Amazon Leo is still months away from the commercial launch of its satellite broadband network, but there’s already at least one satisfied user: Rajeev Badyal, who heads up the Amazon Leo team.

“I was in a remote location last week,” Badyal said today at the Technology Alliance’s annual State of Technology Luncheon in downtown Seattle. “I had the terminal with me. … I was in a place surrounded by mountains. I go, ‘There’s no way that we can make it here.’ The team said, ‘Just go put it there, we’ll take care of the rest.’ And they did it. It worked flawlessly.”

Badyal said he and his wife even streamed a movie in an isolated location where their phones couldn’t pick up a signal. “We were both like two kids who had never seen the internet before, discovering the internet for the first time,” he recalled.

For now, Badyal and other insiders are the only ones trying out Amazon Leo’s satellite service on a beta-testing basis, but it won’t be long before the first customers will be able to sign up.

Badyal, who leads the effort as vice president of Amazon Leo, can hardly wait. “That, to me, is the ultimate milestone,” he said. “That’s why all of us have been working on this — to get it out there, get it in the hands of the customers.”

Amazon Leo won’t be entering virgin territory. For years, SpaceX’s Starlink network has enjoyed the dominant position in the market for satellite broadband services via low Earth orbit. Starlink currently has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, serving more than 10 million customers around the world.

Amazon Leo currently has a little more than 300 satellites in orbit, one year after its launch campaign began in earnest. Over the next year, the team expects the pace to pick up dramatically. “Just a little over a year ago, we used to make one satellite a month, and that was 24/7,” Badyal said. “Now we can do tens of satellites a week at our factory in Kirkland.”

By mid-2029, Amazon is due to have more than 3,200 satellites launched on rockets provided by United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, Arianespace and even SpaceX, under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission. And it’s already received the FCC’s preliminary go-ahead to add another 4,500 second-generation satellites to the network.

Pieces of the puzzle are coming together on the consumer side as well: Although Amazon Leo hasn’t yet announced plans for pricing and availability, it has released information about three levels of service, offering downlink speeds that range from 100 megabits per second to 1 gigabit per second. This week, the FCC released information about Amazon Leo’s Wi-Fi routers.

During today’s luncheon presentation, Badyal and Chris Weber, Amazon Leo’s vice president for business and product, shared a few inside stories about the network’s development.

How it all began

Before joining Amazon, Badyal worked at Starlink’s satellite development operation in Redmond, Wash., and was famously fired by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in June 2018. Not long afterward, Badyal met with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who he said was “extremely passionate and bullish” about creating a satellite broadband network.

“The next thing you knew, I said, ‘OK, I will come and help you build this constellation and make this vision come true,'” Badyal recalled. “And we joined in October.”

Badyal and five other engineers worked out the design for the satellite constellation in an office that was blocked off with curtains. “These were black curtains, and it basically said, ‘Keep Out,'” Badyal said. The engineers wrote up a vision document that ran longer than Amazon’s traditional six pages. “It was harder to write the document than it was to design the constellation,” Badyal joked.

“In January of 2019, we were in front of Jeff. He had just come back from an earnings announcement, and he had the 40-page document in his hand,” Badyal said. “He puts it on the table, and then he goes, ‘I love this stuff.’ I’ll never forget those words: ‘I love this stuff.'”

How Project Kuiper became Amazon Leo

In the beginning, the network was called Project Kuiper. That was an inside-baseball reference to the icy Kuiper Belt that surrounds the planets of the solar system, in a way that’s similar to the belts of satellites that surround Earth.

“Project Kuiper was a project name, so we knew at some point we’d have to evolve that from a project name to an official brand name,” Weber said. “A couple of things went into it: One is, we had to have a name that resonated globally. Number two, it had to be easy to say.”

“Kuiper” just didn’t cut it. Weber recalled an internal video in which an assortment of influencers pronounced the word as “Ky-per, Kweeper, Cooper, etc.”

“Leo,” on the other hand, resonated. For one thing, it’s easy to pronounce. “Leo obviously gives a nod to ‘low Earth orbit,’ so we like that as well,” Weber said. And putting “Amazon” at the front of the name “really means a lot, around trust and credibility,” he said.

Technological turning points

Badyal said the hardest challenge to solve didn’t have anything to do with the satellites themselves, but with building low-cost customer terminals.

“The challenge for us was, can you integrate what you call a receive antenna and a transmit antenna into a single panel that’s small enough and that’s cost-effective?” he said. “We proved that out in 2020. That was the key pivotal point in the program, where you can say the floodgates were open.”

Another breakthrough came with the development of the optical laser links that transfer data between Amazon Leo’s satellites. Badyal said the first test of the satellite-to-satellite connection didn’t work because the satellites weren’t configured correctly. “It’s always the config file that’s the problem,” he said. After the configuration was corrected, the satellites successfully transferred data at the target rate of 100 gigabits per second.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Badyal said. “I had to call the team that night and just tell them what an incredible job they’d done. For me personally, it was emotional. I had to actually sit down for a little bit, just to collect myself. And I was screaming, by the way, and my wife goes, ‘What went wrong?'”

How satellite broadband will change the world

Weber said learning about potential use cases for high-speed connectivity via satellites is “one of the coolest things in my job.”

“I was in Argentina, and we visited a school where the students have a single cellphone that everyone has to share with a connection that’s less than 3G speed. So essentially it’s almost completely unusable,” he said. “What satellite connectivity will bring to those classrooms there is game-changing, not only for that school [but for] that entire community.”

On the business front, Weber said satellite connectivity will also provide greater resilience for enterprises and manufacturing facilities in case terrestrial coverage goes down. And he said there are “tons of use cases” for government services, including connectivity for first responders in remote locations.

“Everyone in Amazon Leo, they come to this not because it’s a job. It’s because it’s this mission of delivering connectivity to underserved and unserved communities across consumers, government and business,” Weber said. “That’s the thing that we wake up to every day.”

A stealthy Seattle startup called TerraByte AI is unveiling a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to sift through real-time satellite data for geospatial gems.

TerraByte’s “Earth Search Engine” analyzes streams of satellite imagery, recognizes features of interest and connects the dots through natural-language queries. The platform’s key advantage is that its data set doesn’t have to go through the laborious, expensive process of manual annotation.

“We’re just using self-supervised learning techniques to essentially understand the pixels without having to manually annotate it,” CEO and co-founder Rishi Madhok told GeekWire.

“There are many applications that you can do, like identifying power-line segments, finding parking lots near highways without EV charging stalls, watching container ships entering port,” he explained. “If you want to monitor the Strait of Hormuz, you can use our models to do that. Deforestation areas, open-pit mining in Arizona — all of these are very different concepts, but our model is able to understand them because it’s a foundational model.”

TerraByte is laying out its approach this week in Huntsville, Ala., at an ESA-NASA workshop on AI models for Earth observation. A hands-on session is scheduled on Wednesday, and the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Fuxun Yu, is due to make an oral presentation on Thursday.

Madhok and Yu founded TerraByte last year, with operations split between Seattle and San Francisco. Madhok previously led geospatial AI initiatives at Microsoft Planetary Computer, while Yu worked as a principal research manager at Microsoft and led the company’s Geospatial Foundational Model project.

On the financial front, Madhok said the venture has received pre-seed funding from Ascend, PSL Ventures and angel investors, though he declined to specify the size of the investment.

Kirby Winfield, founding general partner of Ascend, said in an emailed statement that TerraByte “is building the foundation model layer for satellite intelligence. … They’re creating the foundational API and AI infrastructure that will power the next generation of location intelligence applications.”

Vivek Ladsariya, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs and general partner of PSL Ventures, said his fund invested in TerraByte “because geospatial data is one of the most consequential and underserved categories in enterprise tech.”

“The volume of geospatial data is growing exponentially, yet most organizations still can’t access or act on it effectively,” Ladsariya said via email. “Rishi and Fuxun are rare operators — they’ve lived this problem firsthand and know exactly what it takes to build the infrastructure layer that unlocks it. TerraByte is that layer, and we think it becomes foundational.”

While single-sensor foundation models already exist to analyze the wide spectrum of sensor data captured by satellite companies, Madhok noted that “TerraByte is the first model layer to natively fuse optical, synthetic aperture radar, thermal and hyperspectral in one foundation model.” That multi-sensor approach could support a rapid response to fast-changing situations such as natural disasters.

“For example, we can work with utility companies or even with first responders, and when there’s a wildfire, they can ask for things like, ‘Show me neighborhoods and power-line segments within one mile of an active wildfire in California or Washington,'” Madhok said. “Because when catastrophes happen, you need to be able to monitor them instantly in real time, and there aren’t a lot of technologies out there which can actually give them the insights.”

Risk assessment is another potential application — for example, addressing the challenges that insurance companies face in evaluating wildfire risk. “If they’re able to characterize the risk well by understanding if there are high-risk things like vegetation encroachment, you’re able to have better pricing on some of those things,” he said.

Madhok said the software could also be installed on orbiting satellites to filter data before it’s downlinked. That could minimize the time delay and costs that might otherwise be associated with downlinking massive amounts of data from an Earth observation satellite or an orbital data center.

“Our goal is to build a model which not only works on the ground station, but also works on the edge, so that it helps all these time-sensitive applications to monitor things,” Madhok said. He said the company is already working on arrangements for an on-orbit demonstration.

While TerraByte is still refining its commercial strategy, the immediate focus is on enterprise clients. “Our business startup use case is more focused on B2B, so we’re working with large enterprise licenses, but eventually it will be subscription-based,” Madhok said.

TerraByte isn’t the only company offering geospatial data analysis. Other players in the market include Google Earth Engine and BlackSky Spectra. Still more companies, such as Starcloud and Sophia Space, are working on plans to put computing power on the edge in space. Will TerraByte be able to compete?

“I see Sophia Space and a lot of similar companies who have compute up in space as partners,” Madhok said. “A lot of the companies out there, whether they’re building satellites or collecting imagery, are really good at doing what they do — which is building satellites or sending computers up into space. Our DNA is to build the best geospatial models out there, and that’s what our goal is.”

REDMOND, Wash. — Chris Weber isn’t ready to say yet exactly when Amazon Leo will start letting individual customers sign up for satellite broadband service, but when it happens, he’ll have the right wardrobe for the debut.

During a recent interview at Amazon Leo’s Mission Operations Center in Redmond, Weber sported running shoes in a shade of purple with the Leo brand emblazoned on the back.

“It’s not purple, it’s krypton,” said Weber, who came over from GitLab in 2024 to become Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product. “Krypton is the color when our thrusters fire in space, so we picked that. It was obviously available in the Amazon palette. … There’s a lot of meaning and thought that went into our brands, and we’re quite excited about that.”

It’s been a year since Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, began its multibillion-dollar campaign to send up thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet access across the globe. So far, 304 satellites have been deployed over the course of 11 launches — and Weber said the Amazon Leo team will be running twice as hard in the year ahead.

“The theme moving forward is acceleration,” he said. “What we’ve said is that over the next 12 months, we’ll double the number of launches, satellites, et cetera, so everything is about accelerating that.”

Amazon Leo has already been making its service available to a select group of enterprise customers on a preview basis, and Weber signaled that the official launch of commercial service isn’t all that far away. But Amazon Leo won’t be available everywhere all at once.

“What we’ve said publicly is that in the coming months — so it’s not years away — we’ll launch, and that’ll be in the northern and southern hemisphere, because you need enough satellites to have coverage where your customer terminal is seeing a satellite,” he said. “And so we’ll launch that in the next couple of months, our fixed service. And then as we get more and more satellites up, that coverage will expand inward geographically.”

There’s a lot of catching up to do: Even if Amazon Leo doubles its pace over the next year, it’ll still be far behind SpaceX’s Starlink network, which currently has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit and more than 12 million subscribers.

Closing the gap with Starlink isn’t the only factor motivating Amazon Leo’s speedup: Under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon was supposed to deploy half of its planned 3,232 first-generation satellites by the end of July. The company is seeking a two-year extension; last month, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the agency was still “reviewing the paperwork” for Amazon’s request.

Even assuming the FCC grants the extension and Leo’s pace doubles by mid-2027, Amazon would have to increase its pace further to get to 1,616 satellites by mid-2028, and then speed up even more to get all 3,232 satellites in low Earth orbit by mid-2029.

Waiting for rockets

In its filings with the FCC, Amazon said it had to slow down its deployment schedule due to the limited availability of launch vehicles. It doesn’t help that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture — one of the launch providers for Amazon Leo — had to ground its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket temporarily due to an unrelated launch failure last month.

The rocket shortage forced Amazon to throttle back from its target production rate of five satellites a day at its Kirkland manufacturing facility. Weber said hundreds of satellites are in storage at Amazon’s processing facility in Florida, waiting for liftoff.

“The last I heard, we have like the next six [batches] stacked in the dispensers, ready to go for the launch providers to pick up,” he said.

Weber voiced confidence that heavy-lift rockets from Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace will support a higher launch rate in the year ahead. Amazon is even buying launches from SpaceX to accelerate satellite deployment.

“We’ve contracted for 100 rocket launches, the largest in space history,” he said. “And so, obviously, the commitment is there. We continue to look for ways to acquire additional launches and move launches up.”

Back in 2020, Amazon said it planned to spend more than $10 billion to get Amazon Leo off the ground. Since then, some industry observers have estimated the cost could amount to as much as $20 billion. But the projected costs would be more than matched by the expected payoff.

Just this week, a market study commissioned by Amazon and conducted by Oxford Economics estimated that broadband services provided by satellites in low Earth orbit could add between $32 billion and $863 billion to global GDP by 2035, and support between 800,000 and 21 million jobs worldwide. By 2035, somewhere between 78 million and 421 million people could be using satellite broadband, depending on which of the scenarios analyzed by the British-based advisory firm actually plays out.

Inside Mission Control

Amazon has been careful about protecting the “secret sauce” of its satellite operation — which means you’d be hard-pressed to find full-frontal photos of its fully deployed satellites, or pictures showing the display systems inside its Mission Operations Center in Redmond.

Suffice it to say that the MOC is laid out much like NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, but on a smaller scale. Most of the time, satellite operations are monitored by a handful of controllers, but that number can swell to about 20 team members for a launch.

The current center is larger than the facility that Amazon used for putting a couple of prototype satellites through their paces starting in 2023. It opened for business not long before the first launch of operational satellites. A corporate-style snack bar is around the corner from the rows of computer consoles, and a porthole installed on the center’s back wall lets visitors peek in from the lounge outside the doors.

Amazon has also been careful when it comes to discussing pricing for satellite broadband. In last month’s annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promised that Leo’s services would come “at a lower cost than alternatives.”

The company has described three tiers of service:

• Nano: 7-by-7-inch portable antenna for download speeds up to 100 megabits per second.
• Pro: 11-by-11-inch antenna supporting 400 Mbps downloads.
• Ultra: 20-by-30-inch antenna, delivering up to 1 gigabit per second for downloads and 400 Mbps for uploads.

“We showed a downlink video of 1.3 gigabits and above the 400 on the uplink, which is quite stunning,” Weber said. “So we feel really good on the design. The stability of it, the quality is job one for us as we’re putting that up.”

Even though Amazon isn’t quite ready to reveal its pricing, either for the terminals or for the subscriptions, Weber said his team has a good handle on what the price should be.

“That’s a lot of work we’ve been doing over the years that looks at lots of different external metrics and internal metrics,” he said. “The good news is, particularly on the government and business side, you get demand signals every day, and we’ve been talking to customers every day. … We get incredible signals in order to be able to forecast our demand by not only customer terminal, but what’s the service plan they would need, the speeds they would need on the downlink and uplink.”

Satellite synergies

Amazon is also fine-tuning its strategies for taking advantages of synergies between Leo and its other business lines, starting with Amazon Web Services.

“We’ve announced our private networking option via AWS, where if you’re a business or a government customer, you can go from your customer terminal to the antenna into your AWS data estate or computing estate or your own private data center without ever touching the internet,” Weber said. “That’s incredible value. And boy, does that resonate significantly with business and government customers.”

Regular consumers will see synergies as well, potentially involving Prime Video, Fire TV, Ring, Zoox and even Amazon delivery services. “Without announcing anything, I would say we’re very excited about bringing differentiated new value to our customers across the Amazon set of products and services,” Weber said.

Like SpaceX, Amazon Leo is nailing down deals for in-flight connectivity with the likes of Delta and JetBlue — and exploring the latest frontier in connectivity: direct-to-device satellite service.

“We just announced the acquisition of Globalstar and our partnership with Apple on direct-to-device,” Weber said. “That’s been part of our strategy from the beginning, but it really starts to expand the use cases.”

Amazon is expected to follow through on Globalstar’s expansion plans and take them to the next level, but it won’t fold its direct-to-device service into Amazon Leo’s broadband offerings. The way Weber sees it, the direct-to-device market is different from the satellite broadband market, at least in the short to medium-long term.

“What direct-to-device does is open up brand-new scenarios where people simply don’t have connectivity today, and now you’re taking these billions of mobile handsets and making those connected so you can do voice messaging, those types of things,” he said. “The way I think about it is that they’re pieces of a puzzle and expanded use cases, with broadband and direct-to-device versus one replacing the other.”

Some connectivity customers may want both. “You could foresee something in the automobile where they want broadband coverage, but also the ability to have direct-to-device, which is lower speed but gives you broader connectivity,” Weber said.

What else does Weber see in his crystal ball? What will Amazon Leo look like a year from now?

“Well, I will tell you, we’ll be in service, and we’ll have a lot more satellites up, and so we’ll have broader geographic coverage,” he said. “The thing that I talk to our team about all the time, and it’s the thing we’re focused on, is building a service that customers love. That is job number one, two and three for us — because if we get that right, then as we expand, everything else can happen.”

As Weber said, Amazon Leo is likely to be available initially to customers in mid-northern and mid-southern latitudes. Internet users can plug their postal code and email address into an online form at Leo.Amazon.com to get updates on the project’s progress and availability in their area.

Cowboy Space Corp., a space startup growing out a new satellite and rocket engineering center in Seattle, raised $275 million in a Series B funding round this week that valued the company at $2 billion.

The Bay Area-based company — formerly known as Aetherflux — was founded in 2024 by CEO Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of the trading platform Robinhood.

Cowboy Space is building satellites that double as data centers, powered by solar energy harvested in orbit. The idea is to sidestep the two biggest bottlenecks for AI computing on Earth — the soaring demand for electricity and the scarcity of land and water needed to cool traditional data centers.

The company also builds its own rockets to launch the satellites, and has designed the rocket’s upper stage and the data center as a single unit rather than separate pieces.

Cowboy Space opened a Seattle office earlier this year with a focus on satellite design and rocket/propulsion engineering. A rep for the company told GeekWire Wednesday that they anticipate 40-60 employees in Seattle initially, and there are currently 18 positions advertised across roles including avionics, mechanical engineering, spacecraft design, and software.

Director of Satellite Engineering David Larson, a SpaceX and Amazon vet, and Head of Propulsion Warren Lamont, a Blue Origin and IonQ vet, will be leading the office. The company is not yet sharing details on the specific location for the satellite center.

The startup is competing for talent in the Seattle area with a robust aerospace community of companies big and small. They include Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Starfish Space, Starcloud, Xplore and many more. SpaceX also produces satellites for its Starlink broadband constellation from its Redmond, Wash., facility and Amazon produces satellites for its Amazon Leo broadband satellite network in Kirkland, Wash.

The company is collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy its Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in low Earth orbit, and plans to launch its first satellite later this year to demonstrate space-to-Earth power beaming.

Total funding is now $365 million. The latest round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from new investors IVP, Blossom Capital, and SAIC, alongside existing investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos and Bhatt.

For more than a quarter-century, Jeff Bezos has been funding his Blue Origin space venture primarily with his gains from Amazon, the other big company he founded — but according to a report in the Financial Times, Blue Origin is now weighing a plan to seek outside investment for the first time.

The report says Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that the company might have to turn to external fundraising if it went ahead with plans to increase its launch cadence significantly. The Financial Times attributed its report to two unidentified sources who attended the meeting. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin for comment and will update this report with anything we hear back. The company doesn’t typically comment on claims attributed to unidentified sources.

Blue Origin launched its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket for the first time in January 2025, and two more New Glenn missions have followed since then. The most recent launch took place last month but failed to put its payloads in their proper orbit. As a result, New Glenn is grounded until the company completes an investigation and takes corrective actions under the oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Past reports have suggested that Blue Origin was targeting as many as 12 New Glenn launches this year, and as many as 100 launches per year in the longer term.

Bezos founded his space venture in 2000. In 2017, he told reporters that his business model was to “sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock” and invest it in Blue Origin. Since then, the company has brought in revenue from suborbital spacefliers and researchers, commercial satellite operators and government agencies including NASA. One of the notable contracts was a $3.4 billion award to build a crew-capable lunar landing system for NASA.

But Blue Origin has billions of dollars in capital expenses to cover, including expanded manufacturing and launch facilities in Florida. It also has to compete for talent with SpaceX, which is planning an initial public offering that values the company at more than $2 trillion.

During the all-hands meeting, Limp reportedly referred to the potential for outside fundraising as he responded to questions about a new stock option plan for employees. The Financial Times quoted its sources as saying that Limp did not rule out a future IPO.

NASA has awarded a $6.9 million contract to Seattle-based Interlune for the development of a system that can extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.

The system will be developed and tested on Earth under the terms of an 18-month Small Business Innovation Research Phase III grant, and then launched to the moon on a commercial robotic lander in 2028. Interlune says the project meshes with its plan to extract and market lunar helium-3 for applications on Earth ranging from quantum computing and medical imaging to neutron detection and commercial nuclear fusion.

“We’re gathering data and advancing technologies that serve multiple purposes across industry and government,” Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune, said today in a news release. “NASA’s continued investment in space technology enables technology development projects like this one to ensure America’s leadership in building the lunar economy.”

Interlune’s payload will include a robotic arm and scoop to gather up moon dirt (technically known as regolith), a particle-sorting device, hardware for heating up lunar material and harvesting the gases that are given off, a multispectral camera capable of determining helium-3 concentrations, and a mass spectrometer that can analyze the gases.

“For the first time ever, we will measure volatile gases by heating lunar regolith while on the moon, dramatically advancing the scientific community’s understanding of its properties,” Interlune chief scientist Elizabeth Frank said. “The data we collect will also tell us how much power is needed to extract resources like helium-3.”

The project builds on Interlune’s previous efforts to build payload prototypes and test them on parabolic airplane flights that simulate lunar gravity. The company plans to send a camera to the moon on California-based Astrolab’s FLIP rover as soon as this summer for a demonstration mission known as Crescent Moon. In March, Astrolab announced that it would work with Interlune to integrate resource extraction hardware onto future lunar rovers.

The NASA-supported mission, called Prospect Moon, would generate data detailing the concentrations of volatile materials that have been deposited on the moon’s surface by the solar wind. Follow-up missions could focus on extracting hydrogen for rocket fuel and other lunar power applications, alongside helium-3 that could be sent back to Earth.

Interlune says it already has nearly $500 million in binding purchase orders for helium-3, from quantum computing companies and from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of the Air Force. For initial deliveries, Interlune plans to harvest helium-3 from natural gas supplies on Earth while full-scale lunar infrastructure is developed.

Helium-3 is the first resource targeted by Interlune, but the company plans to widen its focus over time to extract other potentially valuable materials from lunar regolith, including industrial metals, rare earth materials and water.

Interlune was founded in 2020 and reported raising $18 million in seed capital in 2024. This January, Interlune announced an additional $5 million investment offering aimed at advancing key technical milestones.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture used a previously flown New Glenn rocket booster to send a satellite into space today, marking a first for the company.

It was also New Glenn’s first launch failure.

The first-stage booster — nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds” — made its second successful touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, drawing cheers from the Blue Origin team. But hours later, AST SpaceMobile said that its BlueBird 7 satellite was not deployed into its intended orbit.

“BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle,” the Texas-based company said in a news release. “While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its onboard thruster technology and will [be] deorbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.”

The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7:25 a.m. ET (4:25 a.m. PT). The twice-used booster made its first flight last November when it launched NASA’s Escapade probes on a mission to Mars. Blue Origin’s Florida team recovered and refurbished the booster for today’s launch.

Blue Origin executed the same maneuver today. The webcast showed the booster settling down to a touchdown on the landing craft, which was christened Jacklyn as a tribute to Bezos’ mother. Team members could be heard cheering at Mission Control in Florida, at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and at other outposts in Texas and Alabama.

“Welcome back once again, Never Tell Me the Odds,” launch commentator Tabitha Lipkin said. “It’s good to say that twice.”

Bezos celebrated the achievement by posting a video clip of the landing on social media:

This was the third launch for Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket. The first liftoff in January 2025 sent a payload into orbit to test the communication and control systems for Blue Origin’s Blue Ring space mobility platform. Blue Origin tried to recover the booster that was used for that mission, nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” but that first booster missed its chance.

After today’s successful booster touchdown, the focus shifted to the mission’s primary objective: deploying BlueBird 7 from the rocket’s second stage. That was due to take place an hour and 15 minutes after liftoff, but it took an hour longer for Blue Origin to issue an update.

“We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit,” Blue Origin said in a status report posted to X.

AST followed up several hours later with its own statement acknowledging that the satellite would have to be deorbited.

Update: The Federal Aviation Administration classified the launch failure as a mishap, which means that New Glenn rockets will be grounded while Blue Origin determines the cause of the failure and implements corrective actions under FAA oversight. The satellite reportedly was placed in a highly elliptical orbit, suggesting that New Glenn’s upper stage failed to execute the correct engine burn for circularizing the orbit.

BlueBird 7 was meant to join seven other satellites in AST’s constellation, including a prototype BlueWalker satellite. The BlueBird satellites are designed to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to standard smartphones.

AST SpaceMobile said it still plans to have about 45 satellites in its constellation by the end of 2026. It expects to conduct a launch every one or two months on average, supported by agreements with multiple launch providers.

Scott Wisniewski, AST’s president and chief strategy officer, told PCMag last month that the company could begin commercial service in its initial markets once 45 to 60 satellites are in orbit. AST SpaceMobile’s services would be provided through partnerships with AT&T, Verizon and other wireless networks.

Direct-to-device connectivity is shaping up as a fast-moving frontier for satellite broadband services. SpaceX was the first to enter the fray: It struck a D2D deal with T-Mobile in 2022 and is ramping up its Starlink satellite network to accommodate the needs of cellular subscribers.

Last week, Amazon announced that it will acquire Globalstar, a Louisiana-based satellite operator, and will partner with Apple to beef up D2D services. That deal is expected to give a boost to the Amazon Leo satellite broadband network, a Starlink competitor that’s due to begin commercial service this year.

Rocket reusability is another realm where SpaceX has long been a leader but is now facing heightened competition. The ability to recover and reuse rocket boosters plays a huge part in SpaceX’s strategy to drive down launch costs. Despite the unwelcome news about BlueBird 7, today’s launch demonstrated that Blue Origin is able to leverage rocket reusability as well.

This report has been updated with status reports from Blue Origin and AST SpaceMobile.

Amazon isn’t just buying Globalstar — it’s inheriting Apple’s satellite roadmap.

The Seattle-based company’s agreement to acquire the satellite operator behind Apple’s iPhone Emergency SOS feature promises to give it a new constellation of operating satellites, a key slice of mobile spectrum, and Apple as a flagship partner.

The cash-and-stock deal, announced Tuesday, will help the Amazon Leo satellite broadband business press fast-forward in its attempt to catch up with Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Amazon told GeekWire the transaction was valued at approximately $10.8 billion as of April 9, when the exchange ratio was fixed. This differs from the slightly higher figure reported by multiple news outlets Tuesday. The value will fluctuate with Amazon’s share price until closing, capped at $90 worth of Amazon stock per Globalstar share.

Apple is already Globalstar’s biggest customer. In 2024, it committed about $1.5 billion to the company — a combination of prepayments for satellite services and a 20% equity stake in a Globalstar subsidiary — in exchange for the right to most of its network capacity.

Under a separate long-term agreement announced along with the deal, Amazon Leo will power satellite features on future iPhone and Apple Watch models, including Emergency SOS, messaging, Find My location sharing, and roadside assistance. Amazon will also continue supporting the Apple devices that already rely on Globalstar’s existing network.

Amazon renamed its satellite venture from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in November, a move the company framed at the time as a key step toward commercial service. 

On Monday, a day before the Globalstar announcement, Amazon Leo unveiled a new aviation antenna capable of delivering gigabit download speeds to aircraft, part of the build-out for its Delta and JetBlue in-flight Wi-Fi deals.

The acquisition agreement values Globalstar at $90 per share in cash or stock and is expected to close in 2027, pending regulatory approval. Thermo Funding, which controls 57.6% of Globalstar, has already agreed to the deal, according to an SEC filing, meaning no shareholder vote is required.

Globalstar, based in Covington, La., currently operates about two dozen satellites in low Earth orbit. It is in the middle of a major expansion, backed by Apple, that will grow the fleet to 54 satellites. It also holds licensed mobile-satellite spectrum — a scarce and tightly regulated asset that is difficult for newer entrants like Amazon to acquire.

Starlink operates about 10,000 satellites and serves more than 9 million subscribers. Amazon has launched about 200 satellites and has yet to begin consumer service. 

Four astronauts and their Orion space capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today, bringing the first crewed trip around the moon and back since 1972 to a successful end.

“What a journey!” mission commander Reid Wiseman said moments after splashdown.

During their 10-day odyssey, the crew of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission — Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — became the most distant human travelers in history, swinging more than 4,000 miles past the moon’s far side. Koch is the first woman to venture beyond Earth orbit, Glover is the first Black astronaut to do so, and Hansen is the first non-U.S. astronaut to make such a trip.

The flight tested the Artemis program’s hardware and procedures to prepare the way for sending astronauts all the way to the lunar surface by as early as 2028, and for building a permanent lunar base in the 2030s.

“It’s the most important human spaceflight mission I think we’ve done in many decades, in terms of what it meant historically, but also what it means for the future of the agency,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said at a post-splashdown news conference.

Orion’s hardware — including components built in the Seattle area — came through when it counted. Two sets of thrusters for Orion were built by L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne team in Redmond, Wash., while mechanisms that were made by Karman Space & Defense in Mukilteo, Wash., facilitated the safe deployment of Orion’s parachutes in the mission’s final minutes.

NASA calculated that Orion traveled 700,237 miles in all, from its launch atop a massive Space Launch System rocket on April 1 to its splashdown off the coast of California at 5:07 p.m. PT.

Textbook end to a history-making trip

The final hour of the mission unfolded as NASA planned. After jettisoning its European-built service module, the Orion crew module — christened Integrity by the astronauts — hit the atmosphere at a speed of more than 24,000 mph. The shock of re-entry created a plasma field around the spacecraft that blacked out radio communications for six minutes.

The crew endured G-forces that ranged up to 3.9 times the force of Earth’s gravity — about what they felt during launch — and Orion’s heat shield endured temperatures of 4,000 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The trajectory for Orion’s descent was designed to reduce the stress on the heat shield, after NASA discovered that the heat shield for an earlier uncrewed round-the-moon mission, Artemis 1, underwent more serious charring than expected.

“This is the true test of our trajectory,” NASA commentator Rob Navias said.

Orion passed the test: “Houston, Integrity: We have you loud and clear,” Wiseman told Mission Control when the blackout ended, sparking a cheer from ground controllers.

The spacecraft’s parachutes deployed on cue, and Orion’s descent slowed to a speed of 19 mph by the time it hit the water in the Pacific southwest of San Diego.

Moments after splashdown, Wiseman reported that all four of the astronauts were in good health. Orion’s airbags were inflated with helium to help stabilize the floating craft.

“It was a textbook mission,” Navias said.

Recovery teams converged on the touchdown site, hampered somewhat by a glitch that arose with the crew’s satellite phone connection. Mission Control was able to stay in two-way contact with the crew via radio, however, and assisted with troubleshooting.

The astronauts were brought out from the spacecraft and hoisted up to helicopters for transfer to the USS John P. Murtha, an amphibious transport dock ship that served as the lead ship in the recovery effort. After undergoing medical checks, they were to be brought to shore in San Diego — and on Saturday, they’ll be flown to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Meanwhile, the Orion capsule will be towed back onto the USS John P. Murtha’s well deck for transport.

Back at Mission Control, members of the Artemis 2 team hugged each other as they watched the video from the Pacific. “The mission is over, but the melody lingers on,” Navias said.

On the ship, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he “couldn’t be more proud of the entire workforce” at the space agency.

“The childhood Jared can’t believe what I just saw,” said Isaacman, who was born 10 years after the final Apollo moon mission in 1972. “I’ve almost been waiting my whole life to see this.”

He pledged that Artemis 2’s round-the-moon trip wouldn’t be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “We are going to get back into doing this with frequency, sending missions to the moon until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base.”

President Donald Trump passed along his congratulations. “The entire trip was spectacular, the landing was perfect and, as President of the United States, I could not be more proud!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I look forward to seeing you all at the White House soon. We’ll be doing it again and then, next step, Mars!”

Looking back, looking ahead

Even though Artemis 2 was primarily an engineering test mission, the trip also brought scientific benefits. The astronauts conducted a wide-angle survey of the lunar far side, and described areas that the Apollo program’s astronauts couldn’t see with their own eyes due to lighting conditions and a closer-in orbital perspective.

At the beginning and end of their swing around the moon, the Artemis 2 crew captured stunning images of Earthset and Earthrise, stirring the same feelings of awe that were sparked by Apollo 8’s original Earthrise image in 1968. The astronauts also witnessed an unearthly kind of solar eclipse that created an eerie glow around the darkened moon.

The astronauts were 252,756 miles from Earth at the farthest point of their trip, which exceeded the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by 4,101 miles.

Even though it was a textbook mission, not everything went perfectly. The first toilet to be installed in a spacecraft that was sent beyond Earth orbit acted up during the outbound leg of the journey, apparently due to ice that blocked a wastewater vent line. “Nailing this capability is one that we need to certainly work on,” Isaacman said at the time.

NASA also detected a slight helium leak in the pressurization system for the oxidizer tank on Orion’s service module. The leak didn’t pose a problem for Artemis 2, but Kshatriya said the system might have to be redesigned for the lunar landing mission in 2028.

Meanwhile, SpaceX and Blue Origin are still working on the landing systems that will be needed to get future astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA is planning to test-drive SpaceX’s Starship lander and/or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander in low Earth orbit next year during Artemis 3.

If all goes according to plan, one of those landers would facilitate the first lunar landing since 1972 during the Artemis 4 mission in early 2028, and the crew of Artemis 5 would begin work on a base near the moon’s south pole in late 2028.

As a warmup, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is gearing up to send an uncrewed version of the Blue Moon lander, known as Endurance, to the moon’s south polar region later this year. That region is a prime target for lunar exploration and settlement because its craters are thought to harbor reserves of ice that could be converted to drinkable water and breathable oxygen, plus hydrogen that could be used as rocket fuel.

Today Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp added his congratulations on a successful Artemis 2 mission, calling it “this generation’s Apollo moment.”

“On to Artemis III!” he said in a post to X.

The crew of NASA’s round-the-moon test mission crossed the halfway point between the moon and Earth today on their homeward journey — and they’re picking up speed as they zero in on a spot off the coast of California for Friday’s live-streamed splashdown.

At the end of what so far has been a successful Artemis 2 mission, the astronauts are counting on the Orion space capsule’s propulsion system, heat shield and parachutes to work perfectly.

“We’re going to come into the atmosphere at almost 40 times the speed of sound, and then we will slow down to a 20-mile-an-hour touchdown into the Pacific,” NASA pilot Victor Glover told a congressional delegation today during a space-to-ground Q&A. “The heat shield and the parachutes are going to get us nice and slow. … We can’t wait to see the dive team and the Navy that are going to pick us up.”

Glover and his crewmates — mission commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — have been testing Orion’s systems during a mission aimed at preparing the way for a lunar landing that could take place as early as 2028. Their 10-day trip is the first time humans have gone around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis 2 lead flight director Jeff Radigan was asked during a news briefing how Friday’s entry and descent would compare with the “Seven Minutes of Terror” experienced by NASA’s Curiosity rover during its 2012 Mars landing.

“It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right,” said Radigan, referring to the time period between the start of atmospheric entry and splashdown. Then he amended his remarks. “It’s not 13 minutes,” he said. “It’s an hour and a half of things that have to go right.”

NASA has been streaming live coverage of the 10-day mission via YouTube continuously ever since the Orion spacecraft, christened Integrity by its crew, lifted off atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket on April 1. But the space agency will boost its coverage to a higher orbit on Friday with special programming that starts at 3:30 p.m. PT. That programming will be aired on commercial streaming services as well as on YouTube and NASA+.

The show will also be aired on the big screen at the Museum of Flight’s William M. Allen Theater in Seattle. Doors open for seating at 3 p.m. The event is free for museum members and included with museum admission. Museumgoers arriving after 3 p.m. can ask for the Sunset Special to receive 50% off admission.

Here’s the schedule for the Artemis 2 homecoming. All times are PT:

4:15 p.m.: Communications handover from the Deep Space Network to the orbital Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, also known as TDRS.

4:33 p.m.: Orion’s crew module separates from the spacecraft’s European-built service module. After separation, the service module burns up in the atmosphere while the crew module orients itself for descent.

4:37 p.m.: Final trajectory adjustment burn for crew module. Orion begins roll maneuvers.

4:53 p.m.: Entry interface. Orion hits the upper layer of the atmosphere at an altitude of about 400,000 feet. The spacecraft executes a “lofted entry” maneuver to help reduce its velocity. NASA optimized this “skip entry” maneuver after the 2022 Artemis 1 mission saw unexpected charring on the heat shield. The lofted trajectory helps dissipate heat more evenly.

Friction and atmospheric plasma will heat the air around the capsule to around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creating a layer of ionized plasma that blocks radio signals. The communications blackout is expected to last about six minutes.

“The G profile will actually be very similar to what it is on launch,” Glover said. “We’ll get into the 3 G’s on the way down for a normal entry, but if it is ballistic, we could get up as high as 9, 10 G’s, which is what you pull in a fighter jet. … And so the G profile is going to be pretty sporty.”

4:59 p.m.: Communications with Orion expected to resume. The spacecraft’s forward bay cover is due to be jettisoned at an altitude between 36,000 and 24,000 feet.

5:03 p.m.: Drogue parachutes deploy at 22,000 feet.

5:04 p.m.: Main parachutes deploy at 6,000 feet.

5:07 p.m.: Splashdown. The main parachute will be cut, and Orion will inflate helium-filled airbags to make sure the capsule floats right side up.

Orion’s descent will be monitored from the air and sea, and recovery teams are expected to take less than two hours to extract the astronauts from the capsule and fly them via helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha, an amphibious transport dock ship.

The astronauts will undergo onboard medical evaluations, and then they’ll be brought to shore in San Diego, where they will board an aircraft that will take them to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Meanwhile, the Orion capsule will be towed back onto the USS John P. Murtha’s well deck for transport.

Friday’s homecoming will put some of the components that are built for Orion in the Seattle area to their sternest test:

• L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond, Wash., provided the 12 reaction control thrusters critical for re-entry orientation, alongside eight auxiliary engines for the service module. The Redmond team played a role in the refurbishment of Artemis 2’s Orion main engine, which was originally used on the space shuttle Atlantis — and will play a bigger role in building future main engines.
• Karman Space & Defense’s facility in Mukilteo, Wash., built the thruster separation system that will be used to jettison Orion’s forward bay cover. That cover has to come off in order for the spacecraft’s parachutes to deploy, at an altitude high enough to allow the parachutes to unfurl properly.
• The Mukilteo factory also makes mechanisms for a side hatch release system that Orion’s crew could use in the event of an emergency landing condition after splashdown.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., referred to Washington state’s supporting role when she participated in today’s congressional chat with the astronauts.

“This mission is a major investment in science and a testament to human achievement,” she told the crew. “The Orion thrusters were built here in the state of Washington. And I invite you all to come and see the innovation and the people that you’ve inspired.”

Then Cantwell asked what could be learned on the moon using human eyes that can’t be learned from robotic rovers.

Glover took the microphone. “You know, I hope this really resonates because of what’s going on back there, at least what we hear about going on back home and in our communities,” he said. “I think you all can feel the energy that this mission has brought.”

He recalled that one of his friends told him, “I want to know how it feels. There’s going to be tons of pictures, but I want to know how it feels.”

“I think a rover can collect data a lot slower, but the human is going to be able to do it much faster,” Glover said. “But then they’re also going to come back and tell you how it feels, physiologically, in a technical and medical sense, but also in an emotional sense, so that we can continue to have that human connection. Not just the scientific and exploration, but the human connection.”

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems has raised $50 million in a funding round aimed at speeding up development of the Seattle-area startup’s highly maneuverable space vehicles.

The first such vehicle, Starburst-1, is due for launch as early as this fall as a payload on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 satellite rideshare mission. Portal is also getting ready to move into a 52,000-square-foot manufacturing facility where future Starburst spacecraft and even more capable Supernova space vehicles will be built.

Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg — who co-founded the company in 2021 following stints at tech ventures including SpaceX and Stratolaunch Systems — characterized the newly announced Series A funding round as closer to a giant leap than a small step.

“The thing that’s exciting me the most, and really the company at large, is that it helps us move faster,” he told GeekWire. “We’re obviously focused on getting Starburst and Supernova capabilities demonstrated and available to our customers as quickly as we can.”

The round was led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33, with participation by Booz Allen Ventures, AlleyCorp and FUSE. It builds on a $17.5 million seed round that was announced last year.

Portal is developing a solar thermal propulsion system that will use focused sunlight to heat the ammonia-based propellant for its Supernova space vehicle. The system is designed to allow for rapid adjustments in Supernova’s orbit. Orbital maneuvers that would typically take weeks or months to execute using traditional propulsion systems could be done in hours or days.

Starburst would use a more traditional thruster system, but would take advantage of many of the technologies being developed for Supernova. “Eighty-one percent of the components are shared between Starburst and Supernova,” Thornburg said. “We’ve got a lot of delta-v packed in the Starburst, even though it’s a smaller platform.”

Starburst-1, which is being readied for a potential October launch, will be equipped with TRL11’s video camera and edge processing system plus Zenno Space’s superconducting magnetic actuator for a yearlong test mission in sun-synchronous orbit.

An experimental payload nicknamed “Mini-Nova” was sent into orbit last month to test the control software and power systems for Starburst as well as for Supernova. “Mini-Nova is healthy … and so I think we’re in good shape for what’s to come,” Thornburg said.

The first Supernova is due to be launched next year, thanks in part to $45 million in funding from the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX program. Thornburg said Supernova-1 could take on any of a variety of missions that “support the Defense Department’s needs where it comes down to rapid maneuverability.”

Portal’s team is already looking further out on the mission timeline.

“We have a lot of interest from a lot of different customers, including the government just by itself, as well as commercial companies in the service of defense or commercial missions,” Thornburg said. “So, we’re leaning forward on the second Starburst build. And then, in parallel, one of the first uses of the new building will be assembly work for Supernova-1. … We can continue to build Starburst in our existing facility if we want to, for a certain amount of time.”

Portal is aiming to build as many as four spacecraft per month by the end of 2027 — which means the company is going to need a bigger workforce. “We’re at about 40 people at the company,” Thornburg said. “We’ll probably double in size throughout the rest of this year.”

How would Starburst and Supernova be used? “For defense, what we’re really targeting is areas I would describe as space domain awareness, or being able to observe things that sometimes can be difficult to observe,” Thornburg said. “And then I think the second application in the defense category is to protect and defend. We have adversaries on orbit doing things that are very confrontational, and I don’t know that we always have equivalent capabilities or deterrence in kind.”

On the commercial side, Thornburg points to orbital debris tracking and removal. “Recently you had a Starlink satellite breaking up,” he said. “That creates a problem for SpaceX and other people. Having to move around this stuff costs money and time. So, you’re seeing a profit motive for dealing with orbital debris on the commercial side, as well as their own surveillance.”

Portal and an Australian venture called Paladin Space recently announced a partnership to create an orbital debris tracking and removal service that could go into business as early as next year. Starlab Space, an industry consortium that has been laying the groundwork for a commercial space station, has already signed a letter of intent to integrate the Portal-Paladin service into future station operations.

Thornburg said Supernova could also play a role in NASA’s Artemis moon program, which recently set its sights on building a permanent lunar base. “We have the performance to be able to easily move between GEO [geostationary Earth orbit] and cislunar domains in a way that could be helpful for logistics, experiments, communications, data and other things. We don’t have a lot of spacecraft that can do that without the aid of a rocket right now,” he said.

In all these cases, Portal aims to capitalize on its ability to offer rapid mobility in space — a strategy that received strong backing from the company’s leading investors. “We are confident that Portal will become the Space Mobility Prime in the near future,” said Aaron Burnett, group CEO of Mach33.

“The future of space is dynamic, and that shift is being recognized globally,” said Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, partner at Geodesic Capital. “Portal Space is pairing deep propulsion expertise with advanced spacecraft development built for mobility, reliability and scale. Geodesic is thrilled to co-lead Portal’s Series A and work alongside Jeff and the team as they continue to expand what’s possible in space.”

A day after the Artemis 2 mission’s historic lunar flyby, NASA has released a stunning set of high-resolution images documenting Earthset and Earthrise, a solar eclipse that set the moon aglow, and other views of the lunar far side and the astronauts who took the pictures.

The photographs were taken during a seven-hour lunar observation period at the farthest point of the Orion space capsule’s 10-day odyssey. The mission marked the first crewed trip around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the farthest-ever voyage by space travelers (252,756 miles from Earth, and more than 4,000 miles beyond the moon).

The Earthset photo was captured just as our home planet was sinking beneath the lunar horizon, followed about 40 minutes later by a picture of Earth rising above the horizon on the other side of the moon. The pictures rekindled the spirit of NASA’s original Earthrise photo, taken by astronaut Bill Anders during Apollo 8’s round-the-moon mission in 1968.

As Artemis 2’s astronauts prepared to take their own Earthrise photo, NASA astronaut Christina Koch said she was inspired by the original. “I had the photo up in my room as a kid, and it was part of what inspired me to keep working hard to achieve things I dreamed about,” she said.

The original Earthrise is one of the best-known photos from the Apollo era, but it took decades to confirm who actually took the shot. Anders wasn’t the sort of person to make a fuss over attribution. After a long career at NASA, at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in the diplomatic corps and in private industry, he settled down in Western Washington and founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Burlington, Wash. Two years ago, he died in a plane crash in waters off the San Juan Islands at the age of 90.

Anders and the original Earthrise aren’t the only connections linking Artemis 2 with the Pacific Northwest. The success of the mission depends in part on components built in the Seattle area. L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond worked on Orion’s main engine and built some of its thrusters, while Karman Space Systems’ Mukilteo facility provided mechanisms for Orion’s parachute deployment system and emergency hatch release system.

Artemis 2’s four astronauts — Koch, NASA mission commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were scheduled for off-duty periods today as Orion coasted toward Friday’s Pacific Ocean splashdown. The astronauts took questions from the crew of the International Space Station during a ship-to-ship chat.

“Basically, every single thing we learned on ISS is up here,” Koch said. The big difference? “I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it,” she said. “It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. … We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal. The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.”

Meanwhile, NASA’s image-processing team put in long hours overnight to work on the pictures taken by Artemis 2’s astronauts during the flyby. Pictures are being posted to NASA’s lunar flyby gallery. Check out these highlights, and click on the images to feast your eyes on higher-resolution views:

Artemis updates from Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space says it has raised about $110 million in a funding round that will help the company execute its first satellite servicing missions and scale up operations for more business.

The Series B round was led by Point72 Ventures. Activate Capital and Shield Capital were co-leaders of the round. Additional major participants included Industrious Ventures and NightDragon. The round also drew support from several existing Starfish investors (NFX, Munich Re Ventures, Toyota Ventures and PSL Ventures) as well as new investors (Nomi Capital, Gaingels and Overlap Holdings). 

The new capital adds to previous funding rounds announced in 2021, 2023 and 2024, and pushes Starfish’s total investment past the $150 million mark.

Starfish Space was founded in 2019 by engineers Austin Link and Trevor Bennett, two veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. The company has developed a space vehicle called Otter, which is designed to rendezvous and dock with other objects in orbit — either to maneuver them into a different orbit or guide them to safe disposal.

The company demonstrated its technologies during a software test in 2025, code-named Remora, and during two orbital test missions involving scaled-down Otter Pup prototypes.

Starfish already has several Otter missions under contract, including:

• A $37.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force for a satellite docking demonstration, plus a $54.5 million contract for a follow-up mission.
• A $52.5 million Space Development Agency contract for disposal of military satellites.
• A $15 million NASA contract to inspect defunct satellites.
• A commercial contract with SES to provide satellite life extension services.

“Closing this round reflects the real momentum we are seeing across both our technology and our customer base,” Link said in a news release. “We have Otter missions under contract, successful demos, and our first operational mission launching this year. We’re ready to help organizations get the most out of their on-orbit infrastructure.”

Starfish said it will use proceeds from the investment round to execute contracted Otter missions, scale the Otter business line to meet customer demand and grow the company’s team, which currently has more than 90 employees.

“From our perspective, Starfish has made steady progress toward practical on‑orbit servicing,” said Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures. “We believe their early traction with defense and commercial customers and successful autonomous missions show these capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant to space operations and national security.”

Four astronauts today became the first humans to make a trip around the moon since the Apollo era — and added new pages to history books for the Artemis era.

The Artemis 2 crew reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record for human travel that was set during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 by more than 4,000 miles.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch marked the occasion in a radio transmission from NASA’s Orion space capsule, named Integrity. “We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” she said.

Koch made history as the first woman to travel beyond Earth orbit. One of her crewmates, NASA pilot Victor Glover, is the first Black astronaut to take a moon trip, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is the first non-U.S. astronaut to do so.

The main purpose of the 10-day Artemis 2 mission is to serve as an initial crewed test flight for the Orion spacecraft, which traced a similar round-the-moon course during the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in 2022. A successful Artemis 2 mission will prepare the way for a lunar lander test flight in Earth orbit as early as next year, potentially followed in 2028 by the first crewed moon landing since Apollo.

Seattle-area tech workers have played a role in getting Orion off the ground — and bringing it back home. L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond worked on the spacecraft’s main engine and some of its thrusters, while Karman Space Systems’ Mukilteo facility provided mechanisms for Orion’s parachute deployment system and emergency hatch release system.

Artemis 2’s flight plan took advantage of orbital mechanics and a precisely timed firing of Orion’s main engine to send the astronauts on a free-return trip around the moon and back. The moon’s gravitational pull caused Orion to make a crucial U-turn around the far side, at a minimum distance of 4,067 miles from the lunar surface, and then slingshot back toward Earth.

A scientific swing around the moon

Scientists enlisted the astronauts to make up-close geological observations of the lunar surface during the flyby. Because the Artemis astronauts had a wider perspective on the moon than Apollo astronauts did five decades ago, they could see parts of the far side that had gone unseen directly by human eyes (although they’ve been well-documented by robotic probes).

NASA’s mission commander, Reid Wiseman, found it difficult to break away from moongazing to discuss his observations over a radio link with Kelsey Young, Artemis 2’s lunar science lead. “You’re pulling me away from the moon right now, so let’s go,” he told Young.

Back at Mission Control in Houston, Young took it all in good stride. “I have to say that ‘moon joy’ is the new term that’s already become our team’s new motto,” she told Wiseman.

The astronauts focused on features of scientific interest — including Orientale Basin and Hertzsprung Basin, two multi-ring impact craters that document different geological eras on the far side. They noted subtle shades of green and brown on the mostly gray moonscape. They also took a close look at the south polar region, which is the target for the Artemis program’s first crewed landing.

“The view of the south pole is quite amazing,” Glover said.

Koch marveled over the bright young craters that stood out on the lunar surface. “What it really looks like is a lampshade with tiny pinpricks, and the light is shining through,” she said. “They’re so bright compared to the rest of the moon.”

Emotional moments

Hansen told Mission Control that the astronauts were proposing new names for two craters they spotted on the surface below. “Integrity” was chosen as the name for one of the craters, in honor of the crew’s spacecraft. The other crater was dubbed “Carroll,” in honor of Wiseman’s wife, who died in 2020. After Hansen spelled out Carroll’s name, the astronauts came together to give Wiseman a comforting hug.

That wasn’t the flyby’s only emotional moment. Koch said she felt an “overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon” and comparing it with Earth. Her description of the feeling was similar to astronauts’ accounts of a phenomenon known as the Overview Effect.

“Everything we need, the Earth provides,” she said, “and that is in itself something of a miracle, and one that you can’t truly know until you’ve had the perspective of the other.”

Just before Orion was due to pass behind the moon for a temporary blackout, Glover took the opportunity to refer to the Christian commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. “As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still able to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth, and around Earth, we love you from the moon,” he said. “We will see you on the other side.”

About 40 minutes later, Orion emerged from the other side of the moon, and communication was restored. “It is so great to hear from Earth again,” Koch told Mission Control.

“We will explore, we will build ships, we will visit again, we will construct science outposts, we will drive rovers, we will do radio astronomy, we will found companies, we will bolster industry, we will inspire,” Koch said. “But ultimately, we will always choose Earth.”

Earthset, Earthrise and an eclipse

The behind-the-moon turnaround provided the crew with opportunities to capture images of Earthset and Earthrise — and marked the beginning of Orion’s homeward journey. Back at Mission Control, the support team turned their double-sided mission patches around to change the focus of the patch’s design from the moon to Earth.

But the workday wasn’t yet finished: For the grand finale, the astronauts donned protective glasses and watched as the sun passed behind the moon to create an unearthly kind of solar eclipse. As the sun sank beneath the lunar horizon, they captured pictures of the solar corona.

Glover reported that the corona created a bright halo “almost around the entire moon,” with the lunar surface illuminated ever so faintly by Earth’s reflected light. “It is quite an impressive sight,” he said. “Earthshine is very distinct, and it creates quite an impressive visual illusion. Wow, it’s amazing.”

The sun’s re-emergence from behind the moon marked the end of today’s seven-hour lunar observation session. “I can’t say enough how much science we’ve already learned, and how much inspiration you’ve provided to our entire team, the lunar science community and the entire world with what you were able to bring today,” Young told the crew. “You really brought the moon closer today, and we can’t thank you enough.”

High-resolution images and reports about the observations are due to be downlinked and distributed in the days ahead. Planetary scientists will be poring over the data long after Orion and its crew make their scheduled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday.

After the flyby, President Donald Trump congratulated the crew over an audio link and called them “modern-day pioneers.”

“Today you’ve made history and made all America really proud,” he said. “No astronaut has been to the moon since the days of the Apollo program. … At long last, America is back.”

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s science team has discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids — a feat made possible by the Simonyi Survey Telescope’s advanced capabilities and data-crunching software developed at the University of Washington.

Rubin’s deluge of discoveries, based on a million early-stage observations that were collected over the course of a month and a half last summer, includes roughly 380 trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, and 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects. (Don’t panic: None of those near-Earth objects poses a threat to Earth.)

The data set also includes more than 80,000 previously known asteroids, some of which had been “lost” to science because of uncertainty about their orbits. The findings were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, the global clearinghouse for small solar system objects.

These aren’t the first finds for the $800 million observatory in Chile, which made its “First Look” debut last June. Astronomers previously reported finding more than 1,500 asteroids during earlier test rounds.

“This first large submission after Rubin First Look is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observatory is ready,” UW astronomer Mario Jurić, who heads Rubin’s solar system team, said in a news release. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will unearth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fundamentally reshape our inventory of the solar system and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imagined.”

The observatory’s centerpiece is the Simonyi Survey Telescope, named after the family of Seattle-area software billionaire Charles Simonyi. Equipped with the world’s largest digital camera, it can generate 20 terabytes of raw data per night. That data is analyzed and interpreted by scientific institutions around the world — including UW’s DiRAC Institute. (DiRAC stands for “Data-Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology.”)

“Rubin’s unique observing cadence required a whole new software architecture for asteroid discovery,” said Ari Heinze, a UW astronomer who worked with graduate student Jacob Kurlander to create the software that detected the asteroids. “We built it, and it works. It seems pretty clear this observatory will revolutionize our knowledge of the asteroid belt.”

Once it ramps up to full operation, the Rubin Observatory is expected to identify almost 90,000 new near-Earth objects, or NEOs, in the zone around our planet’s orbit. Some of those NEOs could be hazardous, and early detection would give scientists, engineers and policymakers a head start on the development of planetary defense strategies.

The trans-Neptunian objects that were found in the broad zone of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune include two icy bodies that appear to have extremely elongated orbits. The Rubin team says these two objects — designated 2025 LS2 and 2025 MX348 — reach distances that are roughly 1,000 times farther out from the sun than Earth. That would place them among the 30 most distant known celestial objects of their kind.

If the far reaches of the solar system harbor a large trans-Neptunian object — a hypothetical world known as Planet Nine or Planet X — Rubin should be able to detect it.

“Searching for a TNO is like searching for a needle in a field of haystacks,” said Matthew Holman, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and former director of the Minor Planet Center. “Out of millions of flickering sources in the sky, teaching a computer to sift through billions of combinations and identify those that are likely to be distant worlds in our solar system required novel algorithmic approaches.”

Holman worked with Kevin Napier, a research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics, to develop the algorithms for detecting distant solar system objects with Rubin data.

The Rubin discoveries that have been announced to date are only a prelude to Rubin’s 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Simulations suggest that over the course of the coming decade, the Rubin Observatory will find millions of previously undetected asteroids.

Operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

This research is available at the Rubin Asteroid Discoveries Dashboard. In addition to Jurić, Heinze, Kurlander, Holman and Napier, the research team members include Pedro Bernardinelli, a former DiRAC postdoctoral fellow at the UW, now at the Institute for Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of São Paulo; Joachim Moeyens, a UW research software engineer and B612 Asteroid Institute team member who earned his doctorate in astronomy at the UW; Siegfried Eggl, a former UW postdoctoral researcher in astronomy, now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne; and Erfan Nourbakhsh at Princeton University.

After years of postponements and close to $100 billion in spending, NASA has launched the first mission to send astronauts around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The 10-day Artemis 2 mission began today with the liftoff of NASA’s 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. ET (3:35 p.m. PT). NASA is streaming coverage of the flight via YouTube and Amazon Prime.

During the last two hours of the countdown, engineers addressed concerns about the rocket’s flight termination system and instrumentation for a battery on the launch abort system. “Godspeed, Artemis 2,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told the crew just before liftoff. “Let’s go!”

Artemis 2 is the first crewed test flight in a series leading up to a moon landing that’s currently scheduled for 2028. It follows Artemis 1, which sent a crewless Orion around the moon in 2022. This time, four astronauts are riding inside Orion: NASA mission commander Reid Wiseman, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“Great view,” Wiseman told Mission Control during the rocket’s ascent. “We have a beautiful moonrise, we’re headed right at it.”

Koch will be the first woman to go beyond Earth orbit. Similar firsts apply to Glover as a Black astronaut, and Hansen as a non-American astronaut.

Although Artemis 2’s astronauts won’t be landing on the lunar surface, they’ll follow a figure-8 trajectory that will send them 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon and make them the farthest-flung travelers in human history.

Last week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman laid out a plan for establishing a permanent base on the moon and preparing for even farther trips into the solar system. Today, Isaacman said Artemis 2 is “the opening act” of that golden age of science and discovery.

Senior test director Jeff Spaulding, a veteran of the space shuttle program, said he was looking forward to the mission. “I’m excited about going to the moon,” he told reporters on the eve of the launch. “I’m excited about establishing a presence there. It’s something that I have had a desire for, for a great many years — and then to get humans out to Mars as well.”

The mission timeline calls for Orion to adjust its orbit around Earth today and go through system checkouts. An hour after launch, Mission Control had to troubleshoot a dropout in communications with the crew. After a gap of several minutes, Wiseman reported that he could hear capsule communicator Stan Love “loud and clear.” The crew also worked with Mission Control to fix a balky space toilet.

On Thursday, Orion is due to fire its engines for about six minutes to leave orbit and head for the moon. The engine burn is designed to put the space capsule on a free-return trajectory, which takes advantage of orbital mechanics to slingshot around the moon for the return trip.

The health of the Artemis 2 astronauts will be monitored during the flight to gauge the effects of deep-space travel. The crew will also assess Orion’s performance and practice in-flight safety procedures. For example, they’ll rehearse the protocol for taking shelter from radiation storms that might flare up during trips beyond Earth’s protective magnetosphere. They’ll also participate in experiments and make observations of the moon’s far side.

The climactic lunar flyby is due to take place on April 6. “They’re going to be able to see the whole moon as a lunar disk on the lunar far side,” Marie Henderson, lunar science deputy lead for the Artemis 2 mission, said in a NASA video. “So, that’s a brand-new, unique perspective that humans haven’t been able to look at before.”

The astronauts will also get an opportunity to capture a 21st-century “Earthrise” photo, and they may be able to glimpse a solar eclipse made possible by the lunar flyby. “They will be able to see the sun’s corona, which is kinda cool,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.

At the end of the trip, the crew and their Orion capsule are due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. They’ll be brought to a recovery ship for medical checkouts and their return to shore, following a routine that became familiar during the Apollo era.

Artemis 2 is about the history of America’s space program as well as its future. The round-the-moon mission profile matches that of Apollo 8, which served as a unifying event for a nation riven by the social tumult of the time. That mission’s commander, Frank Borman, reported receiving a telegram reading, “Congratulations to the crew of Apollo 8. You saved 1968.” Notably, less than a third of Americans living today were around when Apollo 8 flew.

The main motivation for the Apollo program was America’s superpower competition with the Soviet Union, and today, the geopolitical stakes are similarly high. NASA and the White House are seeking to jump-start progress on Artemis in part because China is targeting a crewed moon landing by 2030.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said this week during a visit to Seattle-area suppliers for the Artemis program that it’s important for America to get to the moon first. “We’re trying to get the best real estate on the moon,” she said. “So, to do that, you’ve got to get up there to claim it.”

The course of the Artemis program, which is named after the goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, hasn’t always run smooth. When the program was given its name in 2019, the Artemis 2 mission was planned for 2022 or 2023, with the moon landing scheduled for 2024. The cost of the program has been estimated at $93 billion through 2025, with each Artemis launch costing $4.1 billion.

Artemis 2’s launch team ran into several challenges during this year’s preparations for launch. Liftoff was initially scheduled for February, but a liquid hydrogen leak forced NASA to reset the launch for March. The launch date was reset again when a helium pressurization problem required a rocket rollback for repairs. The problem was resolved, and the SLS was brought back out to the pad on March 20.

Several companies with a presence in the Seattle area are banking on Artemis’ success. For example, a facility in Redmond operated by L3Harris (previously known as Aerojet Rocketdyne) builds thrusters for the Orion spacecraft and is already working ahead on the Artemis 8 mission.

Boeing is the lead contractor for the SLS rocket’s core stage. Karman Space & Defense in Mukilteo provides hatch release mechanisms and parachute deployment hardware for Orion. And Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, based in Kent, is developing a Blue Moon lander that future Artemis crews could ride to the lunar surface.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is expected to send an uncrewed cargo version of its lander to the moon sometime in the next few months.

This report has been updated frequently during the countdown and mission.

Read more: Artemis 2 gets a push from Pacific Northwest tech

NASA’s most powerful rocket is due to send four astronauts on a round-the-moon journey as early as this week, and although the launch team has to make sure everything goes right in Florida, the mission’s success will also depend on hardware that was built in the Seattle area.

During a visit to two of the contractors for NASA’s Artemis moon program on Monday, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell said that when it comes to spaceflight, it’s important to get the little things right.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, we know how to build big rockets,’ right?” the Washington state Democrat said at Karman Space & Defense’s manufacturing facility in Mukilteo, Wash. “But do we know how to separate payloads and return them, and do all of that? That’s what we’re doing here in Puget Sound. … I think that’s the untold story that people don’t understand.”

NASA’s big story will focus on the first humans to go from the Earth to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Artemis 2’s crew won’t land on the lunar surface during what’s expected to be a 10-day mission. But because their figure-8 route takes them 4,700 miles beyond the moon’s far side, they’ll set a new distance record for human travel beyond Earth.

The first opportunity for liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for 6:24 p.m. ET (3:24 p.m. PT) on Wednesday, with backup dates available through April 6. NASA plans to provide live video coverage of the countdown and launch via YouTube, starting at 12:50 p.m. ET (9:50 a.m. PT) on launch day.

This will be the second launch for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which sent an uncrewed Orion space capsule around the moon for the Artemis 1 test mission in 2022. The Artemis 2 crew — including NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will be the first people to ride an Orion into space.

If all goes according to plan, Artemis 2 will clear the way for NASA to test the lunar landers built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space ventures in 2027, then for Artemis 3 to put astronauts on the surface of the moon in 2028. And that’s just the start. “Ultimately, Artemis is about returning to the moon and building a permanent moon base that can then be used for accelerating our travel to Mars,” Cantwell said.

In order for the Artemis program’s big story to unfold, thousands of smaller but no less important stories will have to play out successfully. NASA says 2,700 commercial suppliers in 47 states have contributed to the Artemis program. More than three dozen of those suppliers, ranging from Blue Origin to SuperGraphics, have a presence in Washington state.

One of the best-known of those Washington state suppliers is L3Harris, which is headquartered in California but operates a facility in Redmond that has built thrusters for nearly every NASA space program. (The facility was operated by Aerojet Rocketdyne until L3Harris acquired that company in 2023. Now L3Harris is in the midst of yet another corporate transition.)

During her visit to the Redmond facility, Cantwell said L3Harris and other space companies exemplify the “engineering mindshare” that’s one of the strengths of the Pacific Northwest’s tech industry. “That is why people have called us the Silicon Valley of space,” she said.

L3Harris’ Redmond team manufactures thrusters for Orion’s European-built service module, Orion’s crew module and the Space Launch System’s upper stage. It’s also been given a leading role in the development of the main engine for future Orion spacecraft.

John Schneider, vice president of operations for L3Harris, acknowledged that most of the rocket engines built to send astronauts to the moon come from other places. “But if you want to come back, you need a Redmond thruster to bring you back and get you back to Earth safely,” he said.

You also need the hardware built by Karman Space & Defense. Like L3Harris, Karman is based in California but operates a facility in the Seattle area. The team in Mukilteo makes mechanisms that ensure the safe deployment of Orion’s parachutes, and mechanisms that are designed to open a side hatch on the Orion spacecraft if the astronauts need to make an emergency exit.

Jonathan Beaudoin, chief operating officer at Karman Space & Defense, says he hopes we’ll never have to see the hatch release system activated for an actual emergency. “But if we do, it had better work,” he added.

Artemis 2 is currently focusing the space spotlight on the teams supporting the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, but Washington state’s space companies are also involved in other aspects of the Artemis program. Blue Origin, for example, is getting its Blue Moon lander ready for missions to the moon and working on a system capable of turning moon dirt into solar cells and electrical wire.

During today’s tour, Cantwell got a sneak peek at a robotic lander that Karman is assembling for a NASA-supported mission to the lunar surface. The senator said she also heard about innovations that aren’t yet ready for public disclosure. Those innovations could bubble up to the surface as NASA pursues its plan to create a permanent moon base — a plan endorsed in a bipartisan authorization bill that Cantwell and her colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee approved unanimously this month.

“This is about cutting-edge technology. These guys out here aren’t waiting for somebody to describe to them what comes next. They’re out here solving a problem and then saying to NASA, ‘We’ve got a solution.’ And that’s really fantastic,” Cantwell said.

“Obviously, some of this they don’t want to show for intellectual property protection reasons,” she added. “But we’re just really, really proud that our region is so far ahead, thinking through the problems that we’re going to incur and what the possible solutions should be.”

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems has made its first foray into Earth orbit, in the form of a piggyback payload that will test technologies for highly maneuverable space vehicles.

The instrument package, which is about the size of a tissue box, was one of 119 payloads sent into orbit at 4:02 a.m. PT today from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for SpaceX’s Transporter-16 satellite rideshare mission. Portal’s “Mini-Nova” payload was attached to Momentus’ Vigoride-7 orbital service vehicle for the ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Minutes after launch, the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster landed autonomously on a drone ship that was stationed in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the second stage proceeded to orbit and deployed Vigoride-7 and other spacecraft.

“I’ve said for a long time that a company only really becomes a space company once it gets to space, and with last night’s launch out of Vandenberg, that’s now true for Portal,” the company’s co-founder and CEO, Jeff Thornburg, said in a LinkedIn post.

“We know that Mini-Nova is healthy, but it will be a few days before we get to download telemetry,” Thornburg told GeekWire in an email.

Mini-Nova will remain attached to Vigoride-7 for its demonstration mission. Over the next six months, Portal will use the payload to test the “brains and critical power systems for our upcoming Starburst and Supernova vehicles,” Thornburg said.

Both of those vehicles will be capable of maneuvering rapidly in orbit to rendezvous with other objects in space for a variety of purposes — including surveillance and space domain awareness, in-space servicing and space-junk disposal. Supernova will make use of an innovative solar thermal propulsion system that could cut the time required for orbital maneuvers from weeks to hours.

Thornburg said the first Starburst vehicle is due for launch as early as October on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission. The first Supernova vehicle is expected to be ready for flight in 2027.

Portal was founded in 2021 and has received millions of dollars in support from the U.S. Space Force and the Department of Defense. Last year, the startup raised $17.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round.

Starcloud, a startup building solar-powered data centers that operate in space, announced $170 million in new funding Monday, vaulting it to unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is now the fastest in Y Combinator history to hit that milestone, reaching the billion-dollar mark just 17 months after its accelerator demo day.

The meteoric rise follows a period of heavy skepticism.

Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was “fairly roundly pilloried” in its early days. “If you go back to some of the comments on X when we announced, people said it was impossible and we couldn’t do it.”

Starcloud is engineering satellites equipped with solar panels, radiation shielding to protect the electronics from the harsh environment of outer space, communication devices, and a cooling system adapted from International Space Station technology to manage the heat generated by high-performance computing.

Accomplishment and new milestones: In November, the startup partnered with SpaceX to launch Starcloud-1, its 130-pound satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 chip. The mission successfully demonstrated that the hardware could process AI workloads reliably in orbit, including becoming the first to train a large language model in space, the startup reported.

Its next milestone will be the launch later this year of Starcloud-2, a satellite with 100 times the power generation capacity of the first and featuring Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 chip, considered the most powerful AI chip in the world. The system will run customer workloads.

Starcloud’s orbital pitch arrives as terrestrial data centers face a dual crisis: surging power demand and growing “not in my backyard” opposition from local communities.

Residents and officials across the country have pushed back against new computing facilities that can potentially drive up electricity rates and consume vast volumes of water for cooling. From local governments to President Trump, leaders are trying to rein in the impacts of new data center deployments.

“We need to start looking for new ways to do this,” Johnston said. “And actually, what we’re doing is the most sensible.”

The new race to space: Starcloud was founded in January 2024 by Johnston, Chief Technology Officer Ezra Feilden and Chief Engineer Adi Oltean. The founders previously held roles at SpaceX’s Starlink, Airbus and McKinsey & Co.

The team has been on the leading edge of space-based data centers, with an initial focus on processing data from other satellites before transmitting it to Earth. The longer-term plan is to handle all manner of workloads, including data uplinked from the ground.

Other companies are joining the pursuit as well. SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year for the deployment of up to one million data center satellites, according to reports. Axiom Space, Kepler Communications and Sophia Space are likewise developing the technology, and Google began exploring the concept with its Project Suncatcher.

Johnston touts Starcloud’s head start.

“We have a huge edge by being first,” he said. “We’ve got the best team in the world for this. We’re moving incredibly quickly. We’re two years ahead in terms of having any kind of data and telemetry from how these chips perform on orbit.”

The economic path forward: Not everyone is convinced. At a recent Microsoft event, company President Brad Smith said the tech giant might eventually pursue the satellite strategy, but he wasn’t “betting on that.”

“We’re keeping our feet on the ground,” Smith said.

Johnston acknowledges that space-based computing won’t displace terrestrial data centers anytime soon. He expects the economics to shift in space’s favor within three to five years, but even then, less than 1% of new compute capacity coming online would be in orbit.

About a decade out, he expects the sector to hit a tipping point when satellite data centers “will be by far the fastest growing segment,” he said, “and it will continue to be fast growing until it hits almost all compute being in space.”

Funding details: A notable roster of venture capitalists is already betting on it.

The Series A round was split into two tranches: a first tranche led by Benchmark with participation from EQT — which operates more than 70 terrestrial data centers — and an extension round co-led by both firms. As part of the deal, Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board.

The round also included the infrastructure fund Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West and Monolith Power Systems. Angel investors included retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Stephen Wilson, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.

The startup has raised a total of $200 million.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is asking the Federal Communications Commission for authority to send up to 51,600 data center satellites into low Earth orbit, signaling its entry into an increasingly crowded space race.

The proposed constellation, dubbed Project Sunrise, would complement Blue Origin’s previously announced plans for a 5,408-satellite TeraWave constellation. TeraWave would provide ultra-high-speed connectivity for Project Sunrise’s satellites — and for terrestrial data centers, large-scale enterprises and government customers as well.

Once again, Bezos is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is seeking the FCC’s approval for a constellation of data centers that could amount to a million satellites. And SpaceX has already taken notice. So has Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is working on its own plans for a data center network that could call for tens of thousands of satellites.

Tech companies are becoming increasingly interested in fielding orbital data centers because such networks could bypass the power and cooling constraints facing Earth-based AI data centers. Last October, Bezos said at a tech conference in Italy that orbital data centers would be the “next step” in a transition from Earth-based to space-based industry. “We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” he said.

Blue Origin, SpaceX and Starcloud aren’t the only companies involved in the data center space race. Other ventures that have expressed interest include Google, Axiom Space, Aetherflux and Sophia Space.

The competition to build and launch orbital data centers is distinct from the competition to provide high-speed internet access via satellites in low Earth orbit. SpaceX, which now has more than 10,000 satellites in its Starlink constellation, currently dominates that market.

Meanwhile, Amazon — which was founded by Bezos but is separate from privately held Blue Origin — is sending up satellites for its Amazon Leo broadband network (formerly known as Project Kuiper). Amazon is behind schedule on satellite deployment and has asked the FCC for a deadline extension, but the company says it’s still on track to ramp up commercial service this year. Last month, the FCC gave the go-ahead for Amazon to expand the Leo constellation to more than 7,700 satellites.

In the past, Amazon has highlighted the synergies that Leo will have with Amazon Web Services’ cloud and AI offerings. It’s not yet clear whether those synergies might extend to TeraWave and Project Sunrise, or whether Blue Origin might actually compete with Amazon and AWS.

In its 14-page application to the FCC, Blue Origin says Project Sunrise’s satellites would operate in circular, sun-synchronous orbits ranging from 500 to 1,800 kilometers (310 to 1,120 miles) in altitude. The satellites would be built in groupings with three different types of antennas to reflect a variety of coverage requirements. They’d transmit data primarily through laser links, and route traffic through TeraWave and other mesh networks to communicate with ground stations.

Blue Origin is seeking waivers from some regulatory requirements — for example, the requirement for a processing round and a six-year deadline for deploying half of Project Sunrise’s satellites. The company says such requirements could be waived because its satellites will be designed to minimize interference with other satellites.

Blue Origin has been listing job openings for satellite engineers and other positions for people with relevant expertise, including a director of commercial sales for data center markets.

It didn’t take long for SpaceX to file an objection to Blue Origin’s application.

“SpaceX submits for the record Amazon’s petition to deny SpaceX’s orbital data center application and requests that the commission apply the substantive and procedural arguments in Amazon’s petition to Blue Origin’s application to facilitate equitable and consistent review and treatment across both applications,” the company said.

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston took note of SpaceX’s filing in a post to X, calling it “one of the funniest responses to an FCC filing of all time.”

“For background, Amazon opposed SpaceX’s filing, and then Blue Origin (both effectively controlled by Jeff Bezos) filed the exact same thing as SpaceX,” he wrote.

So, will Starcloud get involved in the dispute? “We’re staying out of it!” Johnston said.

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems is partnering with an Australian venture called Paladin Space on a commercial service that would round up and dispose of potentially dangerous orbital debris.

The concept — known as Debris Removal as a Service, or DRAAS — is meant to address one of the most pernicious problems facing spacecraft operators: how to dodge tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that are zipping through Earth orbit.

Since its founding in 2021, Portal has been focusing on the development of maneuverable orbital vehicles that could rendezvous with other satellites, either for servicing or for disposal. Its flagship is the Supernova in-space mobility platform, which will be equipped with an innovative solar thermal propulsion system. There’ll also be a smaller version of the spacecraft, called Starburst. Starburst-1 is due for launch as early as this year, and Supernova is scheduled to make its debut in 2027.

Meanwhile, Paladin Space has been working on a reusable payload called Triton, which is designed to track and capture tumbling pieces of orbital debris that are less than 1 meter (3 feet) in size. That small-to-medium size category accounts for most of the debris that’s being tracked in orbit.

“Triton is built to remove dozens of those objects in a single mission, which fundamentally changes the cost structure of debris remediation and provides the greatest benefit to satellite operators,” Paladin CEO Harrison Box said today in a news release.

The Portal-Paladin partnership calls for installing Triton hardware on Starburst spacecraft. Portal’s orbital platform would go out in search of space junk, and Paladin’s payload would grab the debris. When Triton’s trash bin is full, it would be dropped off for safe disposal while the spacecraft remains in orbit for continued servicing.

The companies are targeting an initial deployment in 2027, focusing on heavily trafficked bands of low Earth orbit. Future missions may take advantage of Supernova’s added capabilities to service a wider variety of orbits.

Other efforts to remove orbital debris are in the works: A Japanese company called Astroscale executed two orbital test missions (ELSA-d and ADRAS-J) and is now gearing up for follow-up demonstration missions (COSMIC, ADRAS-J2 and ELSA-M). A Swiss company called ClearSpace is working with the European Space Agency on an experimental mission that would take a defunct satellite out of orbit.

Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg said DRAAS will be much more than a one-off demonstration. “This is about making debris removal operational, not experimental,” he said. “Satellite data underpins communications, navigation, weather forecasting and national security. Maintaining that infrastructure requires active debris management. For the first time, we can do that as a repeatable service.”

Portal has already attracted millions of dollars in financial support from SpaceWERX, a division of the U.S. Space Force that focuses on bridging the gap between commercial technologies and military needs. Its partnership with Paladin targets a different market for in-space services. NASA has estimated that debris avoidance maneuvers cost U.S. satellite operators roughly $58 million annually.

At least one potential customer is going public about its interest. Portal said Starlab Space, a joint venture that is working on a commercial space station, has signed a letter of intent to integrate the DRAAS service into future station operations. Starlab’s team includes Airbus, Voyager Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Mitsubishi and Palantir.

“Safety is the foundation of everything we’re building at Starlab,” said Brad Henderson, Starlab’s chief commercial officer. “We’re engineering a station designed to last for decades, one that must meet the highest standards of integrity to protect our crew and the science that will live aboard. Capabilities that reduce collision risk and limit the need for frequent collision avoidance maneuvers directly serve that mission.”

Tonight’s full moon will turn into a red moon during the last total lunar eclipse we’ll be able to see for the next two years — but whether we’ll truly be able to see it with our own eyes depends on the weather. And that’s an iffy proposition for Pacific Northwest skywatchers.

The good news is that total lunar eclipses, unlike a total solar eclipse, can be seen from an entire hemisphere at a time. They occur when the orbital mechanics are just right for Earth to pass directly between the moon and the sun. For about an hour, Earth’s shadow blots out the sun’s rays, except for reddish wavelengths that are refracted by our planet’s atmosphere. That’s what lends the moon its blood-red color.

Tonight’s eclipse begins with a barely discernable penumbral phase at around 1:30 a.m. PT Tuesday, gets into its partial phase at 1:50 a.m. and enters totality at 3:04 a.m. The eclipse’s total phase ends at 4:03 a.m., and the partial phase winds down over the following hour or two.

The bad news, at least for night owls in the Seattle area, is that the skies are projected to cloud over just before the eclipse starts. To check the National Weather Service’s graphical forecast, follow this link and select “Sky Cover” for the desired time (1 to 4 a.m. PT Tuesday). The chart at ClearDarkSky.com can provide a second opinion. (Look at the “Cloud Cover” and “ECMWF Cloud” categories.)

Seattleites who are desperate to witness totality can improve their chances by heading east.

Looking ahead, there’s an almost total lunar eclipse on tap for August, but the next true dose of lunar totality is due to hit in 2028 on New Year’s Eve — and for what it’s worth, skywatchers in Seattle won’t be able to see the total phase.

Aetherflux, a Bay Area-based space startup, is expanding to Seattle to open what it calls a “core center for satellite development.”

[Editor’s note: Aetherflux has since changed its name to Cowboy Space.]

In a post on LinkedIn last week, Aetherflux said its team is growing and the company is currently hiring across all disciplines, from engineering to operations.

Founded in 2024 by CEO Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of the trading platform Robinhood, Aetherflux is currently focused on creating an orbital data center satellite. The company says the goal is for its constellation of satellites — which it calls “Galactic Brain” — to leverage solar power in space to address the massive energy needs on Earth for artificial intelligence. The first data center node for commercial use is targeted for launch in 2027.

The startup will join a robust aerospace community of companies big and small in the Seattle area and beyond. They include Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Starfish Space, Starcloud, Xplore and many more.

SpaceX, which produces satellites for its Starlink broadband constellation from its Redmond, Wash., facility, is seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its plan to put up to a million satellites in orbit to process data for artificial intelligence applications.

Amazon produces satellites for its Amazon Leo broadband satellite network in Kirkland, Wash.

AI companies have been considering the idea of using solar-powered data center satellites to get around the limiting factors for ground-based facilities, such as rapidly growing requirements for electrical power as well as the availability of water for cooling systems.

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy. The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough,” Bhatt said in December. “Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely.”

Aetherflux raised $50 million in a Series A funding in April 2025. The round was led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, with participation from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA, according to TechCrunch. Total funding to date is $60 million.

Based in San Carlos, Calif., and Washington, D.C., Aetherflux’s team includes people who’ve worked at Robinhood, SpaceX, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Anduril and the U.S. Navy.

Aetherflux has attracted to attention from the U.S. military. The company was awarded funding from the Department of Defense’s Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF) to develop space solar power for the military.

The Seattle-area company that comes closest to Aetherflux’s target market is Redmond-based Starcloud, which is working to put a network of data center satellites in orbit. In a LinkedIn post, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston hailed Aetherflux’s Seattle plans as a positive sign for the region’s space industry. “Welcome to the neighbourhood, Aetherflux! … Did we kick off a new trend for space startups?” Johnston wrote.

GeekWire reached out to Aetherflux to learn where its Seattle hub will be located and how many people it hopes to employ. We’ll update when we hear back.